What good is an HP plotter?

[Garth Wilson]

(06-05-2018 06:40 PM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  

(06-05-2018 06:09 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  I do not remember them having any trouble though with the colored felt-tip pens used for doing charts and other things.

The trouble with these was that eventually - rather earlier than later - they ran out of ink. So your plotter spent the best part of an hour painting a beautiful chart and two minutes before finishing it, the blue pen runs dry. You throw the chart away, replace the blue pen and start over. Only this time, it is the green pen which gives up after 10 minutes... And other than with modern ink-jet or laser printers, which know how much ink/toner they have left, a plotter has no idea how long it's pens are going to last.

I was not personally involved in the plotter use where I worked. I only observed from a distance. At the job where I saw the charts being made constantly from vector network analyzers, I imagine the pens were replaced regularly, together, so you don't have the situation you describe. That plotter was going continuously, only a couple of workbenches over, and I don't remember hearing any complaints. Of course, if you're doing business-type charts where you're filling in wide bars on bar graphs with solid color, yeah, the pens will run dry a lot faster.