HP Designjet 500, experience?
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2004-11-21 07:37 PM
This is about 25% of retail minus sales tax and/or shipping for my neighborhood. Does anyone have any experience with these machines good or bad they can report?
I have been up to now "subbing out" my plotting but this does get old with the time/communication factor as well as lack of control. A natural progression is to acquire "plotter" [they're really printers these days] but the right one at the right price.....................as always with me $ output is a factor.
T.I.A.
w3d design
AC 23 Solo US / current build & library
Windoze 10 Pro 64
HP ZBook 17 G4
Intel Zeon 3.0
Twin 2GB SSD
32 GB memory
http://w3d-design.com
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2004-11-21 09:40 PM
i have owned a basic 24" dj500 for almost 4 years. i assume for the price the one you are looking at is the basic model. they are overall great machines especially for the price. i had similar needs to yours and have been very happy i can do most all my plotting 'in house'. i think i paid $2200 for mine with the document stand. this 500 did light work most of it's life, but for over a year i shared it with a firm down the hall who did from 200 to 400 plots / month. i think it was running 8 or more hours a day...
over the years i have done a few upgrades, a jetdirect internal card ($300 +/-) for network printing and the hpgl2 card and 128mb memory ($300 to 400). the hpgl2 card really makes this a much smarter machine. you can use plotflow, reprint jobs, and speed things up with the add'l memory.
you may want to get a info printout showing total hours of use, printhead remaining life, error messages and other info. they can access that from the printer setup screen > printer info> print report. that will show how light of use it has had. the printheads are about $40 each. if they have not been replaced yet, it may be time. this summer i had to have the ink service station replaced, that was about $300. i have a new belt on order right now, looks like that may be getting old. the climate around here is a bit dryer than up there so that may have lead to the belts demise.
you may also want to consider where you locate it. they are a bit loud, so i would not want it too close by. there is a vacuum that holds paper down while printing, so it is quite a bit louder than earlier hp plotters.
i believe the year of heavy usage is why i am having some of these maintainence issues now, if the one you are looking at is really low usage, and at that low a price you should really get lots of prints out of it, for much less cost than you are paying now.
good luck!
aaha! design studio durango, co
27" retina 5k iMac 4ghz i7 os 10.13.6 m395x 4 mb, 32gb ram, 512 gb ssd ac 22 current
15" retina mbp 2.6ghz 1mb 16gb ac 22 current[/size]
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2004-11-22 03:09 AM
I have had mine for 2.5 years. I only just replaced the yellow ink cartridge! I go through about 1 black every 2 months. I use about 2 rolls of paper per month (50m rolls). In Australia the ink cartridges are about $80 each and would be cheaper in the US I imagine.
It is quick for my needs and produces a quite good image. Every now and then HP give away special papers with quantity of other papers purchased. I received a roll of photographic paper for free which gives excellent quality prints for best presentations.
The only problem I have had with it is that I cannot run it through a switch box with another printer. I was running it through a Zip drive to give it enough power to work through the switch box but with an upgrade to the Zip drive that no longer works ????? So I run one printer now through the parallel port and the other through the USB port. Seems ok.
As mentioned in another post I cnat get it to print JPEGS but it will print 3D images in Photoshop PSD format which are good enough for me.
I dont use the HPGL2 card as I have not needed this so far. Downloading from my wireless network can be slow though. So I tend to print through one machine. That is probably an issue with the network thought rather than the printer. The printer comes with a network cable slot and could be hard wired into a network.
Regards,
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2004-11-22 04:47 AM
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It's always good to hear from those who've traveled the road before you, in essence the true value of this talk board!
w3d design
AC 23 Solo US / current build & library
Windoze 10 Pro 64
HP ZBook 17 G4
Intel Zeon 3.0
Twin 2GB SSD
32 GB memory
http://w3d-design.com
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2004-11-22 05:34 PM
Check out if the machine is equiped with the HPGL card... if no - You should buy one as it lets You print bigger plots which can be managed inside the computer (You will receive "avoid out of memory option" when using this card and the proper drivers).....
Best Regards,
Piotr
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2004-11-23 06:21 PM
w3d design
AC 23 Solo US / current build & library
Windoze 10 Pro 64
HP ZBook 17 G4
Intel Zeon 3.0
Twin 2GB SSD
32 GB memory
http://w3d-design.com
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2004-12-01 06:08 PM
Using OSX 10.3 with Mac G5’s and G4’s
We were about to buy a hp designjet 500 or 500ps only to now find out that we would not be able to print (from photoshop etc. ) is this true?
Has anyone been able to solve printing issue with new hp drivers or other solutions??
Thanks, Ron
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2004-12-03 09:22 PM
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And I am really satisfied with this plotter
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Michal
WIN 11
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 6-core
64 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060
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2004-12-04 11:32 PM
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2004-12-05 11:03 AM
WIN 11
AMD Ryzen 5 7600X 6-core
64 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060