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Designjet printing issues


land1

Question

I have recently upgraded from 12.5 to 2008 and am finding that I have not been able to print on my designjet 100plus.

When I send the drawing to print it just sits - I have left it for hours and had no action, although the application dosen't crash.

The plans are 2d with classes set to different opacity and some raster images as well. The opacity setting is the only thing I have changed from my past drawings.

Anyone got any ideas

Cheers

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I performed a couple of prints last that again stopped mid way through the print. I'm not sure if it is related, but examining the printer network card status (via web server built into the printer itself), both stopped jobs has a single network error associated with them. I have updated to latest firmware, but i'm wondering if certain type of a network error may cause some HP models to permanently stall part way through a print.

To be honest, I not expect a network error to stall a print, and that it should detect the scenario, retransmit and recover?

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Running out of memory can cause a Designjet to hang.

Set the windows driver to process the plot in the computer rather than the printer...This is particularly important with a graphics file on a low end Designjet.

Are you talking about memory in the printer or in the PC?

Is this indeed the case with running out of memory in the printer? I can understand this with vector based printers, but raster based printers such as the design jets only process information on a rasterline basis so do not have to buffer much information - only one line at a time.

For example, the Designjet 130 is specified with 64K RAM and is not expandable so HP obviously thinks that this is enough for all its requirements. Its the PC that does to vector to raster based conversion and that is what takes the memory as it effectively needs to build up a raster image in memory before sending it a 'line at a time' to the Designjet.

Just my thoughts but may be wrong, but I can't honestly see why a Designjet needs to physically hold much information other than in its internal FIFO buffers for improved throughput.

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Memory in the printer.

This has been the case with previous design jets when processing raster images.

A small raster can be held in printer memory.

However, with 24 bit colors a resolution of 300dpi each square inch of raster image requires .36 megabytes.

64megabytes will hold 237 square inches with no overhead...less than two square feet.(compression isn't an option since the printer memory would have to hold both the compressed data and the expanded image).

Of course the Dj 130 uses 2400x1200dpi...a theoretical 8.64megs per square inch...entire memory holds less than 7.5 square inches. A 1/4" x 24" swath is 6 square inches. A 24x36 sheet is 864 square inches or 7.46 gigs (about 2 orders of magnitude larger than physical memory).

64 megs is enough for vector processing...which is the principle role of Designjets in most offices.

It's also enough for processing rasters if you use the option in the printer driver to process the image in the computer.

Remember the size of the image in the computer is unrelated to the amount of memory required to print it at a given size. Even a tiny gif is huge when converted to a full bleed raster.

All of the communication with the printer passes through the standard windows printer interface. It doesn't anticipate the radical out of memory conditions common with large format printers.

HP's drivers and firmware are optimized to handle the normal situtation (hpgl 2/vector) plotting without delay through the OS.

Where memory management is critical, they offer the fairy robust software solution of processing the file on the computer.

Or the hardware option of a printer with lot$ of memory.

Edited by brudgers
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