The point is that your office is always "here", and the object - a shopping mall, a new urban neighborhood, a cottage village - is always "there". The distances between “there” and “here”, as a rule, are the maximum possible and, according to Moore's laws, the further the object is, the more often corrections are made to the drawings that are urgently needed at the construction site. Instead of worrying about the accuracy of the printed documents, you, together with your local partners, are puzzling over the logistics, and the delivery of huge drawing sheets is not an easy task, you can't bring it in a daddy under your arm along the way, especially if “on the way” is three hundred kilometers from the printer.
Projects that would not be finalized in the process of their implementation, probably, do not exist, not to mention the fact that even an ideal drawing at a construction site can be accidentally spoiled so that you need a copy of it. And if the problem with the backup copy can still be somehow at least theoretically foreseen, making it a rule to send several copies of each sheet of the project (this is not a cheap measure), then it is not clear what to do with the changes made along the way. However, it is not clear only at first. The same technical experts may well indicate a solution that will completely eliminate the need to transport drawings: a large-format printer can be installed on site, and drawings can be delivered electronically, via the Internet or, if it is impossible to connect to the network, on removable media, the physical dimensions of which traditionally small, but the capacity from year to year, on the contrary, is more and more.
The method is not universal, as unloading a large-format plotter worth several thousand dollars for a small object is financial madness. But the edge of this madness can be easily calculated with a calculator in hand, and you, together with your contractors, can independently determine which objects it is more profitable / convenient to transport the printer to, how many devices your organization needs and how to share all the associated costs between stakeholders.
Once there is demand, there will be supply. Suitable relatively inexpensive monochrome printing technology (usually LED) is available from several manufacturers at once. Of course, none of these machines bears the mark “for sending to a construction site”, since such printers can be used in the bureau itself, where there is a need to print relatively small volumes of technical documentation on large-format media. Not so long ago, a device of this category appeared on the market, which I liked, first of all, by its true printing efficiency: its warm-up time is simply zero, and this is not an exaggeration! After a detailed study of the specifications, it turned out that the rest of the device is very interesting, and it makes sense to write about it in more detail. This is an Océ plotter - PlotWave 300.
To be more precise in terminology, the Océ PlotWave 300 is a multifunctional device. Its scanning module is available as an option, that is, this solution is modular (a fairly common phenomenon in this segment): copying can often be replaced by printing, and not everyone needs scanning and, therefore, it is foolish to narrow down the potential target audience, obliging all customers to overpay for unnecessary functionality … PlotWave 300 in Russia began to be sold since last autumn, and the manufacturer himself is positioning the device as a solution for CAD, that is, it will be promoted to design institutes, architectural bureaus, construction companies - this is just our case.
So the PlotWave 300 caught my attention by the fact that the machine does not need to warm up to start printing. Warming up in electrography is obligatory, but in this case it takes an insignificant amount of time from you. A typical toner heating element in electrographic devices is the pressure rollers, which heat up themselves, heat the toner, and then force the powder into the surface of the media. The PlotWave 300 does not have such rollers, instead it uses the proprietary Océ Radiant Fusing technology. Its essence is that the toner heats up a system of plates made of a durable alloy with high thermal conductivity. These plates heat up very quickly and cool down just as quickly. Compared to other devices, the PlotWave 300 is ready for use almost immediately after switching on. The plates themselves do not come into contact with the substrate during the printing process and cannot damage it. The technology makes it possible to raise the temperature of the plates only slightly above the boiling point of water, and no additional ventilation system is required to cool them. All these features allow you to get the first prints as quickly as possible, provide energy savings of about one and a half times and make the PlotWave 300 a very quiet device. At a construction site, this is probably not so important, but for a relatively quiet office this is an undoubted plus.
It was not for nothing that I said that you will get the first prints quickly. Competitors (say, Xerox 6279) have faster printing speeds and will be in the lead over the long run. The question is how exactly do you use such a widescreen. It is possible that each job will not exceed a dozen A0 prints in volume, and by the time the PlotWave 300 is finished printing, competitors will just start working after warming up. In any case, this exactly coincides with the model of using a printer at a construction site, where printing is rather episodic than in-line, and the same Xerox 6279 will need to be warmed up for three minutes every time. Perhaps, in the future, Océ engineers will come up with something with a relatively low print speed, and this factor will not bother us, but for now, let everyone choose the performance according to their own needs.
In press releases, all manufacturers, without exception, praise the compactness of their large-format printers. The scourge of time is real estate prices, the expensive cost of renting office space. Designers and architects also do not work in palaces, and therefore the smallest possible size of the device is, if we use the terminology of figure skating, a mandatory program. In this respect, the PlotWave 300 is clearly not lagging behind. The scanner, which, I repeat, can be added to the system at your request, fully meets the typical performance for this segment, and in terms of quality, it seemed to me, it even somewhat stands out among other MFP scanners of the same class. You can find fault with the fact that you can scan an original with a thickness of only up to 0.8 mm on the PlotWave 300, while in some competitors this figure is an order of magnitude higher. However, in conditions where the MFP is used for printing and copying drawings and documents, the need to scan a sample with a thickness of a centimeter must be considered exotic.
Now let's move on to the print quality of the PlotWave 300 - nevertheless, this is the main function of the device. This monochrome printing device is capable of producing prints with a resolution of 600x1200 dpi, while the norm in this segment is 600x600. It is also wrong to say that such an advantage of PlotWave 300 is very important, because most projects are excellent at 600x600 dpi. On the other hand, on the PlotWave 300, you can print some drawings at a smaller scale, without fear that because of this, text and thin lines will become difficult to see for the eye.
Otherwise, the parameters and capabilities of the PlotWave 300 are quite balanced. The device meets your habits and does not deceive expectations. As an option, you can choose a system with two rolls, and then the supply of materials for printing when changing the type of media will happen automatically. You can also feed individual sheets by hand. The printer is capable of producing quality prints up to 15m long at a standard width of 914mm at a speed of 2.3 A0 sheets per minute. Prints are automatically cut, and the output tray can take up to fifty sheets. By the way, the tray is located vertically, without taking away extra space from the room, which not all devices in this segment can boast of. I liked how the toner changes: the procedure almost eliminates the possibility of getting dirty or, God forbid, inhaling whatever spills out. Fasten the container with the toner, pull out the flap and the toner under its own weight spills out where necessary.
Finally, one more nice little thing. Remember, at the very beginning, I painted the "wild" Russian reality without the Internet? Of course, the Océ PlotWave 300 supports common project formats and connects to the network. But on the control panel of this plotter there is also a USB port where you can insert a flash drive brought from afar by a courier and print the project directly from it! It would seem that such fashionable things are the lot of the mass consumer segment, but it's not about fashion: it's just convenient. Perhaps, such zests make the choice in favor of the Océ PlotWave 300 more preferable in my eyes: a little better in design, a little better in additional features, a little in efficiency, a little in speed (although “quick start "In practice it is not" a little bit "at all). Perhaps you will pay tribute to these little things, or maybe you will find your own - after all, as you know, in our design craft, it is the little things that are decisive.
