What Are Computer Plotters?
- The original plotter used pens for printing. This restricted the plotters to printing vector or line graphics. The carriage moved across the paper and received instructions from the print control language telling it when to put the pen on the paper, when to lift the pen or where to draw a line. The process was slow, cumbersome and often noisy. However, the lines were continuous and not comprised of dots, providing nearly infinite resolution.
- Before ink jet printers came on the market, plotters were the only viable and cost-effective method of printing color graphics. Some plotters were equipped with up to eight different colored pens and capable of producing high-quality drawings and graphics. Due to the limitations of vector graphing, they could not reproduce raster graphics or photographic images. Until about 1987, plotters were the only reasonable method of producing color graphics from a computer. One problem was the pens themselves. If a single pen dried out or ran out of ink in the middle of a printing session, the entire project has to be reprinted. Since the process of printing often took an hour or longer, this proved to be a real hindrance.
- One of the main advantages of the plotter was that it could print full-size architectural drawings and blueprints. With carriage widths of 36 inches or more, a plotter could produce these printouts on a single page and with extreme accuracy. They were the printers of choice for these applications and computer-aided design drawings.
- With the introduction of ink jet and laser printing technologies, the plotter became more obsolete. By the mid 1990s these technologies had taken over and the plotter became a tool of the past. Today, plotters are mainly found in computer museums or used only by a select few die-hard traditionalists. Drivers and support for the plotters is nearly impossible to find and their lack of efficiency and speed led to the disappearance of a once touted technology
