Warning War Stories and large format printing musings below.
When I worked for Amoco, they did a LOT of big printing. Mainly seismic. I found my wife there, she read the overlaid squiggliey lines for a living (she is a geologist and geophysicist by training, so of course now she runs an horse program for Girl Scouts!). Anyway, they were just getting into doing color seismic intrepretation in those days. After they started to see that printing costs were going out the roof, we found inkjet (then a fairly new technology) was cost effective (compared to the 48" wide graphical printers or the large format photographic printer that was also used). We got some printers from HP. 3 or 4 36" wide to start with. We begged and they started making 42, but not the 48" we wanted. Once we started using the printers, the cost of the cart's drove us crazy (yep, direct from the Manufacturer, we used more than office supply chains could supply). Even then the cart's cost us a LOT of manpower, and so did small rolls (only 50' rolls or so). We found someone to make us large roll feeders with takeup reels that really worked. The rolls were large enough that we didn't have to change them 4 or 5 times per day. But they were heavy, that we never got around. We found a little company that was putting small parametric pumps into cart's and we could just have full colors in gallon jugs, and that really cut the overall cost of printing. Oh yea, a seismic plot covered about 90 to 95% of the surface with ink. 'Normal' printer use was 30-40% for pictures to under 5% for text. But all that was in the late '80s to mid '90s The corporate graphics group was in Tulsa and eventually moved to Houston. They were good folk to work with. A very few still work there but in other areas now. Currently the vehicle wrap makers use an inkjet technology and basically the same HP inkjet printers (Called Designjet now days I think) we used back then. Just different ink, different film to print on. Looking at the HP Designjet web site, I think we were paying more in absolute $ then for the printers than they charge now. What we wouldn't have given for the DJ L28500 (104" wide) or Z6200(photo quality) back then! Most seem to be either 24" or more typically 44" now. Even the multifunction T1200 looks cool (44" wide scanner and photo printer ... only $22K) http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF02a/18972-18972-3328061.html?dnr=1 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en
