Parts of the HP Plotter

Plotters are a wonderful piece of equipment. When your business goes from trying to make a regular inkjet printer "work" to actually owning a professional piece of awesomeness like an HP plotter, you will be amazed that you ever got along without it. But what is it that makes plotters so awesome? What is inside it that makes it work so well?

Formatter Board

The formatter board is the language interpreter of a plotter. Because computers speak to each other in an entirely different language than we speak to them, going in between these languages requires a translator. When you type (or use a picture, etc.) something into a computer, you are using a human language (let's say English). Computers do not understand English. That is, it is easier for computers to take English and distill it down to a series of zeros and ones, than it is for that computer to just understand English. The is true for pictures and the like as well, not just text.

So when a computer has a finished product, ready to be printed, it send over a bunch of zeros and ones to the plotter. While those numbers mean a lot to the computer, they are useless to humans. If a plotter just spit out a bunch of code, it wouldn't be very useful. So plotters have formatter boards to translate those numbers back into something we understand. And they have to be very accurate too, because just one number out of place and that beautiful picture is distorted. Your aunt's head could be purple, that Holocaust memorial banner could be in German, Angelina Jolie's lips could be normal sized! Suffice to say, formatter boards are very, very important.

Paper

Obviously one of the best things about plotters is that print sizes are so flexible. One of the reasons is the paper set up. Unlike inkjet printers, which use sheets of a predetermined size, plotters use rolls of paper. These rolls make it possible for a print job of any size.
There are also many different types of paper for the HP plotter. The most used is called premium bond paper. It is basically just a high quality version of regular printer paper. You can also get translucent paper, which is (this is a brain stretcher); translucent. This paper is good for production printing because it uses a very low volume of ink. An alternative to this is vellum paper, which is a very lightweight paper, used a lot by sewing pattern manufacturers. Also available is xerographic paper, which is usually used by engineers and people using a heavy amount of laser printing.

Carriage Assembly

The carriage assembly is not unique to plotters, but the types that can be found in plotters are a long walk from the typical carriage assembly units you might find in and inkjet printer. The carriage assembly is the thing that holds the ink and slides back and forth across the printer. It also helps keep the paper in place. A plotter carriage assembly, like the C6074-60388, is more evolved than its inkjet cousin. It is bigger, faster, and sleeker. Because a plotter is so much higher quality than a printer, the carriage assembly is built to last. It is built to perform, built to awe.

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