Well, I got the machine in the office (week long test drive)-and appears to be a real beaut. I am running some test plots and the 1050C seems to 'read' the pen settings much thicker. Someone emailed me personally about this, I believe, but since deleted and seem to recall that was a point you were making. Anyway, I am not sure if the pens are actually 'darker' or just more concentrated amounts of ink. The plot reads fine since it is consistently more vivid, but some of the text does get a bit more darker than needed. Do I need to adjust my pens? I would rather not, but I will need to do something. I suppose I am wondering if there are some more settings I can take advantage of before I go fiddling with our CTB. Another thing that is curious is that poches and gradients have quite a bit of color to them-mostly green tint. I say 'color', but mean that I can actually SEE the colors that are trying to make the light gray. Is this typical? Our HP 650C never did that. Any information you guys can supply for a 1050C newbie would be appreciated. Thanks! -- Email is packaged by intellectual weight, not volume. Some settling of contents may have occurred during transmission. Paul Humphrey CAD Manager GUEST - REDDICK ARCHITECTS
Paul, One thing to consider is that every plotter driver can give different plotting results than another one. This is also true of each model of plotter. So in my limited experience with plotting and hoping to get the same result with plotter A as I did yesterday with plotter B, I have found that I need to create new pen widths to suit the new plotter. You are lucky you have an in-house plotter that will be plotting, although when you go to plot the same drawings enmasse for a bid set for example where you will need 15 or 20 sets, you will be using a faster plotter then the 1050c. This will mean that the plotted results may differ again from what you like on the 1050c once you get that one set up properly. However, if that fast plotter is the same one you already are using, then the results will be the same if you continue to use the same pen widths when plotting to that plotter. Confused? I may be wrong about this, but so far in my own life, I have a lot of trouble with this issue. Each plotter requires its own testing and in the end, its own pen widths to accomplish the same look as another plotter, or the same plotter with a different driver. How others handle this will be interesting for me to see. Jack Talsky
I also noticed this with the 1050c. But the problem seemed to start when we upgraded to AutoCAD 2000 from AutoCAD 14. I had to knock off .05mm from my pen widths, to make them look the same as before - but only when plotting on paper. When plotting to mylar, the widths seemed to be the same as before. My solution is to have 2 different .ctb files - one for paper and one for mylar. Kind of a pain, so I'm open for suggestions.
