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This
product is not for the casual printer of just a few copies a month, but
is designed for users who print up to 150,000 sq. ft. of output a year.The print technology uses four cartridges (CMYK) of up to 400ml each (21 times what is a typical cartridge in the printer on your desk). More importantly, this product has technology that uses multiple print heads in an “on the fly reconfiguration” adjusting for clogs, malfunctions, etc., so it just keeps printing. This multiple number of print heads can also reduce the number of passes required in printing lines and polygon fills. This adaptation of print heads on the fly is a first for this class of printer.
The printer itself has a basic internal memory of 256MB, upgradeable to 512MB, and it has a 40GB hard drive. This way, sequential jobs can be passed directly to the printer and stored there until printed. Jobs that are standards can be stored permanently for repeated printing.
The printer stands alone on your network (all built-in) so that there is no required print server; it just becomes another node on your network. You can add wireless and gigabit network connectivity as well.
Note that is not a lightweight device, at 253 pounds. It’s not an impulse purchase, either, at approximately $10,000 to $13,000, depending on features included. It can use all the standard paper types, photo, glossy, coated, vellum, film and canvas. Could canvas printing spiff up your sailboat or hot air balloon?
The most interesting set of functionality is the ability to control the printer via the web using HP's Web Jetadmin software. This is downloaded from the HP web site and works in conjunction with Embedded Web Server firmware that part of the HP 4000. When connected to the printer via Web Jetadmin, all the basic printer conditions can be seen, including ink levels, print head status, job status and media. The printer can be set up to notify its user base via email of problems, job completion, media exhaustion, etc. Job reordering and new job initiation can also be done remotely. There is also an accounting function that lets you export details on ink or media usage to Excel. A certain amount of print pre-viewing can be done with several different file formats (tiffs, jpegs, pdf, etc.), which allow for rotation and scaling by the printer.
Embedded Web Server Features
- PostScript, PDF, JPEG, TIFF, CALS G4, Hp-GL/2, RTL format directly to printer without needing a driver.
- Control and manage all aspects of Print Jobs.
- See the status of ink cartridges, printheads, printheads cleaners, and paper.
- See statistics on ink and paper usage.
- Change various printer settings (print quality, etc.).
- Set a password to restrict web access to printer.
- Request email notifications when specified warning or error conditions occur.
- Update the printer’s firmware and media profiles.
This is an image from
the HP Designjet 4000 Embedded Web Server. Click image for
larger view.
If you need high volume, high quality, large format printer for GIS, CAD and technical applications, this may be the product for you. Since you can manage this device remotely, if you trained the security guards to your building to change paper and ink cartridges and FedEx to come box up and ship the output, you may never have to go to the office again.
