Topic Title

Good morning. Our office is looking to replace our 8+ year old HP 1120C printer. We use it for 11x17 (Tabloid) size check plots and non-critical color printing.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a newer model for replacement? If possible it would be nice to get scan/copy/fax capabilities in the unit, but not critical.

Thanks!

We have been extremely happy with the Epson Stylus Photo 1280. It is very reliable and, in high speed mode, can churn out 11x17 prints pretty quickly. You can buy one for less than $400. The cost of cartridges should be factored in, though. The 1280 has the further advantage of superb photo printing when you use high quality photo paper.

I recently replaced my HP1220c with a HP9800 13x19" color printer, and have been very satisffied. The cartridges last longer and I have been able to sucessfully refill them with standard "Jettec" ink from Staples for the last 6-moinths without having a cartridge fail...black or color. I also spent an extra $80 for a reverser so that I can print both sides of the sheet. It can also do super-hi-resolution photo-printing with special 6-color cartridges; but I haven't tried that yet. Figured it might come in handy for presenattion drawings at public meetings.

With the rare excpetion of a hand-drawn sketch, everything that leaves my architecture office is on 11x17" paper. I haven't issued construction documents on 24x36" in almost three years. Tabloid is so-much cheaper to have copies-made...and it's more convenient to handle and file.

Ted -

What scale do you usually do your drawings at? How big are your projects? How many sheets do you usually generate per project?

Most of the projects we work on are fairly large (a current one is a 25,000sf 2-story building that's 180ft long). It would seem that buildings this size would be hard to display on an 11x17 sheet.

Just wondering ...

Most of my firm's projects are residential or residential-scaled, so we're doing floor plans and elevations at 1/8" or 3/16". One thing we found was that you need to use fairly-fine linewidths on the pen-table, and the key was buying better than standard bond paper to keep the line-work and lettering crisp. Regular 20#/86-brightness paper will bleed-out slighty. I buy at-minimum 20#/92-brightness paper than rated for inket-use. Most store-brand 11x17 is laser-rated. The Hammermill inkjet extra-bright is good, and so is the Xerox "primary Image" inkjet paper.

The key is making the lettering and dimensions readable at the reduced scale when you make the transition. It might require then a few more larger-svale details or partial plans/elevations...but your saving tons of money on repro at the smaller scale. A few years ago, when I was senior architect at a major developer, we figured we saved $750,000 a year in repro and shipping costs between the engineering dept. and estimating and purchasing dept. Basically I get about 50% of a 24x36" drawings information on an 11X17"-sheet.; so I have twice as many sheets...but I get copies for $0.17 / sheet vs. $3.65 / sheet as engineering-copies. Around here, a service bureau will charge approx $10.00 / sheet to plot 24x36" .pdf's or HP-Plot-files. The smaller sheet-size allows you to up the data-density, even though you might have to use four sheets instead of one for a set of building elevations.

Some companies have converted-over to the 11x17" as the "official size", other dual-scale the drawings with the 24X36" as the "official size" and the reduced-scale 11x17" as the distribution size for everyone who does need or want the full-sized sets.

The other nice feature is that since many of my clients have at-least one 11X17" printer somewhere, I can give them a burned-CD with the .pdf's as their record...and I know they can't change the drawings...until giving them the CAD-files for their records as as-builts.

In almost 10 years, I have not had a building department reject or refuse to accept 11x17" drawings as long as they were legible and to-scale...and that the "scale" is indicated on the drawings so that technically the set is not a "reduced copy".

My two latest projects are 11ksf and 13ksf per floor. One is eight floors and the other is six. The eight story job took 40 sheets on 24x36. I use 11x17's for in-house check sets but those are done from 24x36 pdf's. They are convenient, but I can't see converting everything over to 11x17 as the final output size. I could attempt to convert one of my present projects as an exercise, but that would take more time than I am willing to invest in that experiment and the company I work for is against the idea. Maybe when i'm sitting around with plenty of time and money and nothing to do...yeah, right.