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

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.)