HP 455CA Designjet printer

[Anonymous]

I have been offered a HP 455CA Designjet printer - is there a way for this to work easily on Mac OSX 10.5.6?? on a new macbook pro??

and does it work well with ac12?

[Mark Wallace]

Wow....that's a 10 yr old plotter now and no longer supported by HP.

After 8 reliable years, mine died back in 2007....broken belt and print head prob. Techies weren't sure about available parts.

It needs a direct-jet box to work with ethernet to a router or to your macbook. No USB port, only a parallel port & a another kind of port- not ADB.

Should still work with the direct box & OS10.5 so long as the drivers from HP or ArchiCAD are OK. I remember it was a sloooow printer in ArchiCAD so I stayed with the 'plot' mode.

OH!....it had limited ram so that needs to be maxed out otherwise it will not print normal size print or plot files generated by AC 12.

Not sure of this either, but I recently saw that HP would be discontinuing the #72 cartridges at some future point. I would check into this since 400's, 450's etc, all used them.

Good Luck!

Mark
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ArchiCAD 12 2523 USA Full + 11, 10, 9 & 7, Mac G5 Dual 2.3 Ghz, 1.5 Gb OSX.4.11, HP T1100, Epson R1800
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Mark Wallace Architect

[David Maudlin]

david:

I have an HP 650C that works with the latest Macs (see my signature). The plotter has the direct-jet box to connect via ethernet, I use PlotFlow (included with ArchiCAD) to generate plt files that are then sent to the plotter. One issue is finding the IP address of the plotter, it is fixed (and pretty much impossible to change with a Mac), but the plotter's manuals should tell you how to get the plotter to plot a sheet with this information. You need the IP address when setting up PlotFlow.

HTH

David

[Laszlo Nagy]

david wrote:
I have been offered a HP 455CA Designjet printer - is there a way for this to work easily on Mac OSX 10.5.6?? on a new macbook pro??

and does it work well with ac12?

We have a HP 600 DesignJet in our office. It is about 8-9 years old and it is painfully slow. Its output speed is about 5 cm (2 inches) per minute.
I think today's large format printers are way-way faster, even if more expensive.