Do I need to purchase HP GL/2 card for new HP 500 plotter

[jfriddell]

Gentelmen and Ladies:

I am in the market for a new HP 500 plotter. Some vendors have told me that I need the HP GL/2 accessory card, siting printer compatibility issues, and some have not. I mainly print ACAD, generic CAD, and some aerial photograph graphics.

Do I need this accessory card? Can I add it late if I run into problems? What have been your experiences?

Jeremiah Friddell

 

[MikeMilburn]

I, or actually the company , just bought an HP 500, great plotter works like a charm, mind you I'm using TurboCAD but as far as the plotter configuration goes it should be the same.
The formatter card as it's called, allows you to install extra ram, without it there's no place to install it. The only complaint I have about the plotter is the price of the parts. The formatter card, 128m stick of ram and network card were CAN$500 each, kind of overpriced in my books but they got ya, only HP parts will fit.
If you can spring it I'd go for the extra ram and card, it sped up ploting as well without it I noticed a few missing lines. Didn't have much time to experiment to find out if I could get rid of the missing lines without the extra ram as I got it within two days.
And yes, you can add it later, took all of 2 minutes. If you've got any other questions let me know.
Mike

 

[jfriddell]

Gang,

Thank you for the help. It's nice to get an outside opinion. I felt that I was about to be giving a salesman a bonus. At least now, thanks to your comments, I can justify getting the extra card.

Have a great day.

 

[sc]

I hope I'm not to late, but I run autocad 2000 and a few other engineering programs. I have a HP 500 plotter without a HP/GL2 card and with the standard amount of RAM, and it works very well with CAD.

I have printed aerial photos (350Mb is the largest so far) onto A1 paper without problems. The time delay is a pain but I can still work whilst the printer spools so its not really a big issue.


Regards
sc