henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (05/23/84)
The Hewlett-Packard 7470A is a small plotter, aimed at the micro market.
It costs about $1k, plots on 8.5x11 sheets, has two pens (more if you
change pens manually). It will plot on transparencies, given special
pens and special paper-backed transparency stock. It's available with
several interfaces, notably an rs232 interface which can be set up to
share a line with a terminal.
It works pretty well. We got one some months ago, because we had
retired our ancient Versatec and there was continuing user interest
in graphic output. It's had a good deal of use since, and has behaved
flawlessly. We got both plot(3) and S software for it up quite quickly;
the plotter has enough smarts that little work is needed in the host.
The biggest problem we had was that the plot(3) package and the 7470A use
different ways of specifying arcs of circles, and a little fiddling was
necessary to get the conversion working right.
The plot quality is good. We now use our own 8.5x11 printer paper (torn
off from a box of fanfold) for most plotting. On this stuff the ink
spreads a bit more than on HP's glossy plotter paper, but it is still
good enough for most purposes. We also have some indication that pen
wear is a bit worse on our paper, but the pen life is still long enough
that it's not a serious consideration. (We're still on our first pack
of 5 pens after about six months of use.) We leave the pens in the
plotter all the time -- we don't want our users to have to change pens
themselves -- and we've had no problems with pens drying out. Even on
our paper with heavily-used pens, the plot quality is easily good enough
for "final copy", for theses and such.
The speed is quite reasonable. It doesn't have quite the same awesome
quality as the big HP plotters, where the pen flicks back and forth and
drawings magically appear on the paper, but it's still much faster than
a human draftsman could work. (He could probably put lines on the paper
as fast as the 7470A, but he couldn't possibly do it accurately.)
All in all, we highly recommend the HP7470A as a cheap way of getting
good-quality plot output.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henrywunder@wdl1.UUCP (wunder ) (06/02/84)
Has anyone modified the System V graphics stuff to talk to a 7470A? It currently wants to talk to a 7221A, which used "special compacted binary format" for fast service over slow modems. HP has given up on that plotter language, and doesn't even sell 7221's any more, but the Bell software still cherishes the format. Trying to avoid touching Sys V code, w underwood PS: Do they pay those people extra to not comment their stuff?