VW 10/OS 10.2.6 -Plotter Recommendations

[Kurt Magness]

HP is the standard, epson's have nice photo output. Used or older machines have 3rd party drivers, otherwise stick with what comes with the plotter if you buy a new one. HP has a new inexpense Designjet 10 for under $1,000 dollars out, check out the mac mailorder companies for pricing or buy from your hp dealer. The plotters are a bit tricky to setup and if you buy from a dealer they will do it for you and hopefully be nice to you when it doesn't work, which will happen sometimes.

[graham]

What plotter and drivers is best to use with OS10.2.6/VW 10?

[CEA]

In my experience, the best solution for the Macintosh is to use a true postscript plotter. Unfortunately, this means using one of the more expensive HP models, the HP 800PS is the least expensive true postscript plotter HP offers.

I would strongly advise staying away from the 500PS- the HP software based Macintosh print drivers are horrible!

Another workable solution is to use a non-postscript plotter or an older plotter that is supported by the free, open source Gimp-Print driver. In my office, we have been able to get our 3 year old HP488CA plotter to work quite well using the Gimp-Print software. In fact, the gimp print driver works MUCH better than the barely functional, bug ridden, OS 9 based HP software that came with the plotter. I do not know how the gimp print driver works for color prints, but ifor us it is working perfectly for black and white architectural drawings.

Many thanks to the developers of Gimp Print for their great work!