Most offices doing architectural work require an 11x17 printer to print out test sheets for redlines, to give to the client, for sample sets, etc. However there are a limited number of choices in the printer market currently that can satisfy your requirements. I thought it was time to take a look and see what's currently available and what's hot and what to stay clear of. Now, first off, there are 2 types of printers, Laser and Ink Jet. Depending on the manufacturer you might hear Ink Jet also referred to as Bubble Jet or some other term. In today's printer market place, while these are not exactly the same technology, the differences to the common person are next to none and the results for our purposes are nearly the same. This week we will start by looking at lasers printers. There's pretty much only one company that I use for Laser Printers which is Hewlett-Packard. Before purchasing any printer, you should check and see if the printer comes with an ADI driver. A call to their Technical Support service people should answer this, however I've found they are reluctant to put you on the phone with tech support without actually owning a printer. Instead most companies will switch you over to their sales department, and never trust what a computer sales person tells you over the phone. In most cases they know less about the product than you do. In the best situation, the Laser printer will come with an ADI driver for ACAD, with built in HPGL or HPGL/2 language support with a built in or optional Jet Direct network card included in the printer. By including the network card, you can remove the printer from being connected directly to any one machine. Instead it is simply a node on the network, which can allow faster printing and remove processor demands from the computer it's hooked up to. Keep in mind that most Laser printers include a processor chip in the printer itself as well as large amounts of RAM. By its very nature this removes most of the work from the computer doing the spooling and instead places the work on the printer. Ink Jets however have very little RAM and no processor, which tend to slow the computer doing the spooling way down. Some of the nicer Laser printers even have the ability to add in a hard drive for extra RAM for printing very large jobs, or lots of smaller ones. Lasers are also much cheaper to operate, the ink is less money and goes further, the pages print much quicker and the quality is far superior. So, why bother with Ink Jets? Well, two reasons - 1) cost of the original unit and 2) color, color and more color. Laser printers can start upwards of $1000 and quickly go up from there for ones that do 11x17. When looking at Laser printers, make sure you can stick in at least 100 pages. Some printers will allow you to use 11x17, but only if you sheet feed in every single page by hand. Some of the nicer ones will hold an entire ream of 11x17 plus another ream of 8 1/2 x 11. On those that take both kinds of paper, make sure before you buy that the software is choosing the paper and not instead having the printer paper size dependent on which size is currently feed into the machine. As for the color, you can get color Laser printers. You can also purchase and drive a new Porsche. However, more than likely you can't afford a color laser printer any more than you can afford a new Porsche. Now, if you want to be real fancy and you are in need of a new copier, you might want to combine the Laser printer with a copy machine and a scanner. Many of the newer copy machines are now networkable and allow you to print, collate, copy, staple, punch, etc. all from you desktop. If your office prints more than around 100 11x17 plots a month, then looking into a shared Laser printer would be a welcome addition to your office. If however you aren't prolific with your prints a simple Ink Jet might do you very nicely.
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