Need advice on which printer to buy

[Anonymous]

AC Talkers
Our Epson 3000 has worn out it's welcome. It has been a workhorse, touchy paper feed, for a while, real problems with it's drivers during the ransition to OSX. With that said, it is still a usable printer. Anyone interested in buying it? It has an ethernet card and will print to 17" x 22" (C size) paper. We have a complete set (4) of ink cartriges (about $50 dollars each). E-mail me direct if you are interested.

herriges@centurytel.net

We are looking at either an Epson Stylus Pro 7800 or a HP Designjet 500. The Epson lists for about $3,000.00 but is ready to use on a Mac network (Firewire or USB). Epson seems to be more reliable when it comes to Macs. Do you agree?

HP lists for about $2,100.00 but by the time you get it to talk to our network it's price will likely be near the Epson.

The Epson is an 8 color ink system while the HP is only 4, but the way we are thinking, the 4 colors are more then enough and don't really see the need for Epsons 8 colors.

I would appreciate any thoughts that you have as to helping us make a wise descision.

Thanks in advance

[Petros Ioannou]

I'd like to add my experience with HP.
Although I am very satisfied with my 17'' HP laptop and all my HP small format printers and officejets machines, I had a really bad experience with a HP 500ps. Back then we were using a Mac and AC 6.5 and after wasting many sc.meters of paper trying to get a decent, print we asked from the local GS distributor to give us a PC installation disk of ArchiCAD 6.5 in order to connect the 500PS to a PC and print using Plotmaker. This worked ok but we felt deceived as we wasted more money for the ps-Mac version! As I can recall there were no available Mac drivers back then and HP sold this plotter as a Mac compatible.
As for the quality of plotting (at least on a PC) it all comes to settings,quality of paper etc. Also I think that one needs to add a memory card to improve performance.

Petros