Poster Printing (psclarge)
The Department's large-format color printer can produce color prints as wide as 42", and arbitrarily long — great for printing posters and banners. It is an HP DesignJet 5500ps, known as psclarge, and is located in CSE 415. It uses "UV" (fade-resistant) ink, and is normally loaded with 100-foot rolls of 48-lb standard coated 36" wide paper.
There are good Windows drivers for it, which means you can control
lots of the features of the printer via the Print menu in your
favorite application. There are no Unix drivers for it, although it's
possible to send straight PostScript to the printer (the Unix lpr
command will handle this printer by disabling all the usual command
line switch controls.)
This printer was designed for use in commercial print shops, where it can be tended by trained operators. Will it perform in a troublefree manner around here, in a self-service environment with an open population of users? That's up to you!
General Tips
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Be patient and allow plenty of lead time. A poster-sized document will take around 15 minutes to print at 'best' quality. Right before the Affiliates meeting, 50 or 60 people will be producing posters. Changing paper can take a significant amount of time.
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Do not send your job twice, by accident. The printer will swallow an entire print job sent to it by the spooler. So if your job disappears from the queue, it does not mean that it has been lost. Do not panic! And do not resubmit your job too quickly. Check the printer (either physically, or via the printer cambot). You will probably see your job printing within a few minutes, even though it has disappeared from the queue.
If you do accidentally send your print job twice, you can use the "CANCEL" button on the printer front panel, which will kill the job that is printing.
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Don't mess with the settings on the printer's front panel. We know you're really smart, but you must resist fiddling with the printer.
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Do set the paper size in your application to something larger than the actual printed image. A paper size of 36" x 60" works well for posters. NB: You'll need to set the paper size in your application, after you load one of the templates into your application. Did you get that? You need to set the paper size manually! We recommend that you do use the templates. And be sure to check out the templates page for specific instructions for their use (e.g., how to set the paper size.)
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If you want to print a banner, you'll probably need to use Adobe Illustrator or Acrobat, which understand arbitrary page sizes.
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Use the normal 48-lb coated (NOT the Glossy) paper for posters . Don't change the type of paper that is loaded in the printer during heavy periods of wide-spread use, such as the month before Affilliates meetings. Leave the 36" wide paper loaded. "Special forms" (for our purposes, special forms means either 36” Glossy paper or 42” coated paper) handling is tricky with a shared printer, and queue control is not as simple as we might like. If you must — well, just be thoughtful about others who also need the printer. E.g., do it only when others are not likely to be using the printer. And be sure to restore the normal paper when you're finished. Keep in mind that every time the roll is changed, the printer goes through a 15-20 minute cycle to realign the printheads.
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Change the paper only when it's out. When it’s out, printing will automatically cease, and the printer’s front panel display will tell you that it’s out of paper. The rolls are 100' long, and will not need changing very often. When it does, there should be another roll of paper on the wire rack with standard coated 36" wide paper, and you can just swap rolls. If you are not comfortable doing this yourself, STOP, and email Support. It's basically just like changing rolls of toilet paper. (And you don't leave an empty roll in place at home, do you?) One difference is that the two ends of the spindle are not the same, and the roll has to go on the printer in a specific orientation. The manual and the quick start guide are on top of the printer – both have explicit instructions for changing the roll.
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Always use the front panel control buttons for loading or unloading paper. It tells you exactly what to do, and when to do it (in what sequence). If you perform any of the loading/unloading steps before the front panel tells you to do so, bad things can happen. If you are ever in doubt about any of these procedures, you don’t have to do a thing - just email Support.
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Do not make posters with coloured backgrounds by creating an enormous block of solid colour. Not an efficient use of ink. A light (10% or less) shaded background should be ok.
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Paper cutter. There is a companion large-format paper cutter in 415, capable of cutting materials up to 42" wide, and up to 1/8" thickness. Instructions are on the back. Do not lift the cutter by the two metal bars!
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Mounting. There is posterboard in the room and a table you can use for mounting your poster. Spray-on adhesive, a roller and other supplies. Please do not spary adhesive on the table!
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The web-cam image of the printer at the top of this page is refreshed whenever you reload this page. Or click on the image to get a larger image that streams live video (you zoom in on the front panel or your poster as it emerges from the printer).
Need help? Ask Support.
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