Your Printer Team

Large Format Printer With Scanners
By Damian Sofsian

Large format printers are a very convenient and often indispensable tool in producing hard copies of digitalized images such as technical drawings, paintings, maps, and office documents. It is an important part of electronic document management, in which the first step is scanning. So it is, in many cases, desirable to have printers with scanning capabilities. This need is all the more evident when it is required to produce enlarged images from drawings stored on microfilm. The conversion of actual drawing into microfilm requires a scanner with medium resolution. But when a microfilm is being scanned, it must be done at very high resolution so as to have good image quality in the print and to show the details in an enlarged copy. The printer is generally of inkjet type. UV curable inkjet printing is a relatively new technology in printing.

HP DesignJet 815 MFP is a printer-scanner with a resolution of 2400×1200 dpi. This makes it suitable for scanning microfilms as well as for any other scanning purpose, and it handles even thick, rigid media. It is designed to handle CAD output, GIS and graphics. It is capable of scanning and printing both color and black and white images. The printer is of thermal inkjet type. It can manage widths of up to 42 inches and media as long as 50 feet.

Epson Stylus DX4800 is another all–in-one color printer, scanner and copier. It can give a resolution of up to 5760×1440 optimized dpi on qualified media. It is a fast printer capable of producing as many as 20 pages per minute. The scanning area is 216mm x 297mm. The printing width is also not very high, but the quality is excellent. The scanner has a maximum resolution of 1200dpi and a scanning speed of 30msec per line at this resolution. At lower resolutions of 600dpi and 300dpi, it gives better speeds of 15msec per line and 10msec per line, respectively.