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He is not looking for a large format laser printer. True large format would be called a plotter and will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printe

He is not looking for a large format laser printer. True large format would be called a plotter and will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce who was bought out by Canon. Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" and duplex so a booklet can be cut down to 11"x17" with full bleed. Both are industrial equipment and are expensive and require service contracts. Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding. That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
As someone who has supported printers for decades, and has a friend who owns a print shop, almost nothing in this is true. > True large format would be called a plotter No, plotters are devices with pens. Layman may occasionally refer to a large format printer as a "plotter" because of its resemblance and it's faster to say, but nobody in the industry refers to them as plotters. > will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce You're describing large-format photocopiers. They operate exactly like an old-school optical-only photocopier which photographically exposes the drum (versus printers and digital copiers which image the drum via LEDs or a laser.) They are often called "plan copiers." Said friend's print shop has one and it is in fact made by Oce. > Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" Many, many copiers can handle 12x18 paper. "Digital press" usually refers to enhanced paper storage, speed/volume, and finisher capabilities beyond what a typical office copier/MFC offers, often coupled with some sort of software and workstation for managing the print jobs. Often a "digital press" is indistinguishable from a heavy-duty copier with finisher units > Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding. Toner does not bleed. > That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave. Colorwave uses melted 'toner' and sprays it, like an inkjet, onto a page. You're confusing Colorwave with the Phaser printers made by Xerox, which use dyed wax. Phaser prints used to be cutting edge back in the 90's for proofing work, but have long since been eclipsed by every other printing technology. The wax can be scraped off the page. If the page is bent too much, it crinkles. It's easily damaged by even slight heat. It's dye based not pigment based, so the prints fade and color shift very quickly. The technology is such garbage that Xerox has tried renmaing it - they now call it "colorcube" or something similarly stupid. They push per-page figures, while ignoring the machine's horrific TCO (they consume massive amounts of electricity and require a lot of service work; if disturbed too much while at operating temperature, molten wax gets into places it shouldn't be and requires an expensive service call. Etc.)
- BashiBazouk 4y ago
  Uh, no. Here is Canon's page on the machines in question: https://cpp.canon/products-technologies/large-format-plotters/ https://cpp.canon/products-technologies/large-format-plotter... See how they are called plotters? They currently use Radiant Fusing technology: https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-of-oc-radiant-fusing-technology-0ce-plotter https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-... "Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink jet usually the HP 5000 series. The industry moved to the colorwave because the ink jet prints would bleed when wet. Yes, the colorwave uses toner but I was told it was in a wax medium. The toner balls certainly felt like wax if you handled them... Seems like you are being a tad pedantic and not entirely correct...
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    Canon pages has it in the title "plotters AND printers". Plotter is a pen moving over paper drawing continuous lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter
    - BashiBazouk 4y ago
      Well, we called them plotters when printing plan sets...
      - vincnetas 4y ago
        You could have called them "cars" or "planes" or whatever. This does not change the definition of word "plotter" ;) edit: well, when i think about it, it does change definition of word if everyone starts calling plotters "cars", but there has to be a majority.
        BashiBazouk 4y ago
        https://cpp.canon/products/plotwave-series/ https://cpp.canon/products/plotwave-series/ "Get great looking technical documents with the black and white plotters" The B&W machines are plotters. The color machines are printers and I don't see anything pen based at all...
jeffbee 4y ago
Yeah ... this rant is kinda more about the author than anything. He's mixing information by constructing a nonsense query. "Large format printing" is at least 18 inches wide, on a roll. He's looking for 11"x17", which is just "a printer". The Google results for the query `11x17 laser printer` are much better. At least for me all the carousel ads on the top, the top (and only) text ad, and the first organic results are all direct hits. There is some SEO junk further down, of course. This is a garbage-in, garbage-out situation where both the web and the query are garbage and Google is doing what it can.
- sleepybrett 4y ago
  It's all advertising lingo. I have certainly seen machines that claim to be 'large format' when the largest they support is 11x17 (or A3). But others that support roll paper with widths > 24". HP sells a number of these under the designjet brand and calls them plotters. While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension. Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead. The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Those definitions seem normal and right to me. I would say that the early plotters I used in the 80s had the pen on one axis and the paper moving on the other axis in both directions (HP 7470, for example).
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      There are other plotters around that time, roland's for instance, that used a more obvious cartesian model. IE a 'print head' sliding on an x-axis rail, that slides on an y-axis rail. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uECs0F8Txj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uECs0F8Txj0, the roland dxy-1200) Obviously if you use a roll of paper you need to run the paper itself back and forth unless you want to build something as big as a shopbot style table. I think the design for the 'roll-paper' plotters drove the design of much smaller plotters like the 7475a (which also moves the paper on one axis). Perhaps HP had a patent on that 'paper moves on one axis, pen moves on another? Regardless, both designs were present in the 80s.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

KennyBlanken 4y ago

As someone who has supported printers for decades, and has a friend who owns a print shop, almost nothing in this is true. > True large format would be called a plotter No, plotters are devices with pens. Layman may occasionally refer to a large format printer as a "plotter" because of its resemblance and it's faster to say, but nobody in the industry refers to them as plotters. > will print 36"x48" sheets faster than your home laser printer will pump out letter sized sheets but are almost all B&W. The most common ones are made by Oce You're describing large-format photocopiers. They operate exactly like an old-school optical-only photocopier which photographically exposes the drum (versus printers and digital copiers which image the drum via LEDs or a laser.) They are often called "plan copiers." Said friend's print shop has one and it is in fact made by Oce. > Medium format color laser printers are usually called a digital press and are commonly 12"x18" Many, many copiers can handle 12x18 paper. "Digital press" usually refers to enhanced paper storage, speed/volume, and finisher capabilities beyond what a typical office copier/MFC offers, often coupled with some sort of software and workstation for managing the print jobs. Often a "digital press" is indistinguishable from a heavy-duty copier with finisher units > Now what's interesting is the building industry has the same problem that Adam Savage has, the prints (plan sets) must be able to get wet without the ink/toner bleeding. Toner does not bleed. > That has been solved with ink jet technology that uses a wax based ink. Cartridges full of wax balls in the standard process colors, an example would be a Canon colorwave. Colorwave uses melted 'toner' and sprays it, like an inkjet, onto a page. You're confusing Colorwave with the Phaser printers made by Xerox, which use dyed wax. Phaser prints used to be cutting edge back in the 90's for proofing work, but have long since been eclipsed by every other printing technology. The wax can be scraped off the page. If the page is bent too much, it crinkles. It's easily damaged by even slight heat. It's dye based not pigment based, so the prints fade and color shift very quickly. The technology is such garbage that Xerox has tried renmaing it - they now call it "colorcube" or something similarly stupid. They push per-page figures, while ignoring the machine's horrific TCO (they consume massive amounts of electricity and require a lot of service work; if disturbed too much while at operating temperature, molten wax gets into places it shouldn't be and requires an expensive service call. Etc.)

BashiBazouk 4y ago
Uh, no. Here is Canon's page on the machines in question: https://cpp.canon/products-technologies/large-format-plotters/ https://cpp.canon/products-technologies/large-format-plotter... See how they are called plotters? They currently use Radiant Fusing technology: https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-of-oc-radiant-fusing-technology-0ce-plotter https://www.tavco.net/articles/bid/57020/see-the-advantages-... "Toner does not bleed." I know but I was describing the needs not that toner bleeds. I have worked in printing plan sets and the old way for color was ink jet usually the HP 5000 series. The industry moved to the colorwave because the ink jet prints would bleed when wet. Yes, the colorwave uses toner but I was told it was in a wax medium. The toner balls certainly felt like wax if you handled them... Seems like you are being a tad pedantic and not entirely correct...
- vincnetas 4y ago
  Canon pages has it in the title "plotters AND printers". Plotter is a pen moving over paper drawing continuous lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter
  - BashiBazouk 4y ago
    Well, we called them plotters when printing plan sets...
    - vincnetas 4y ago
      You could have called them "cars" or "planes" or whatever. This does not change the definition of word "plotter" ;) edit: well, when i think about it, it does change definition of word if everyone starts calling plotters "cars", but there has to be a majority.
      - BashiBazouk 4y ago
        https://cpp.canon/products/plotwave-series/ https://cpp.canon/products/plotwave-series/ "Get great looking technical documents with the black and white plotters" The B&W machines are plotters. The color machines are printers and I don't see anything pen based at all...

jeffbee 4y ago

Yeah ... this rant is kinda more about the author than anything. He's mixing information by constructing a nonsense query. "Large format printing" is at least 18 inches wide, on a roll. He's looking for 11"x17", which is just "a printer". The Google results for the query `11x17 laser printer` are much better. At least for me all the carousel ads on the top, the top (and only) text ad, and the first organic results are all direct hits. There is some SEO junk further down, of course. This is a garbage-in, garbage-out situation where both the web and the query are garbage and Google is doing what it can.

sleepybrett 4y ago
It's all advertising lingo. I have certainly seen machines that claim to be 'large format' when the largest they support is 11x17 (or A3). But others that support roll paper with widths > 24". HP sells a number of these under the designjet brand and calls them plotters. While traditional plotters used pens (aka pen plotters), I think a more accurate definition might be something that uses a set of motors to move a printing toolhead (be it pen, ink jet, knife, laser, router or whatever) along a medium (paper, vinyl, wood, etc) in a continuous line in the x and/or y direction. Where a traditional printer only moves the paper through in one direction and realizes the image 'line by line' across the perpendicular dimension. Owning several vintage plotters (mostly pen) and a couple of modern pen plotters (axidraw, custom built). I have no problem imagining the same general mechanism driving any toolhead. The HP7580, HP7475a, AxiDraw, every laser cutter i've seen, shopbots, modern hp designjets, etc .. All plotters.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Those definitions seem normal and right to me. I would say that the early plotters I used in the 80s had the pen on one axis and the paper moving on the other axis in both directions (HP 7470, for example).
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    There are other plotters around that time, roland's for instance, that used a more obvious cartesian model. IE a 'print head' sliding on an x-axis rail, that slides on an y-axis rail. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uECs0F8Txj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uECs0F8Txj0, the roland dxy-1200) Obviously if you use a roll of paper you need to run the paper itself back and forth unless you want to build something as big as a shopbot style table. I think the design for the 'roll-paper' plotters drove the design of much smaller plotters like the 7475a (which also moves the paper on one axis). Perhaps HP had a patent on that 'paper moves on one axis, pen moves on another? Regardless, both designs were present in the 80s.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]