In the past when we have needed large format prints e.g. for health promotion campaign posters we have either done them by hand or outsourced them. Doing them by hand might sound like the cheapest option and its okay for one-offs but anything more than that has real costs in terms of ‘man’ hours. Outsourcing also has expensive costs and is only worth doing when you want a lot as this brings the cost per sheet down.

It does appear to be a large amount of money, but many other departments in the NHS and social services are in the same boat so we will be able to share with them. We charge reasonable rates; enough to cover the price of inks, wear and tear plus a few pence profit per sheet but we expect them to supply paper- if they don’t we charge over the market price for the inconvenience. We charge more for A1 prints as these have to be fed in individually unless they provide a staff member to do this and we charge less for A2 as these are automatic. This printer over its first month generated enough to cover a ¼ of its cost which isn’t bad

The maximum paper size is 1625 mm x 625 mm (Length x Width) and it leaves a border of 5 mm at the top and sides with the border being 12 mm at the bottom. You can also have an optional paper roll feed with this printer but we didn’t; we use precut paper (the roll feeder is another £500 so wasn’t worth it for us). It can, of course, print smaller pieces anything including and above postcard size (100x148 mm) but we don’t use it for anything less than A2 as we have printers that do A4 and smaller already and the ink for these is cheaper. A 70 ml cartridge for the DesignJet 130 cost around £20

The DesignJet 130 was incredibly easy to install; just a matter of loading the software and plugging it in through the USB, ours isn’t a networked version by the way… we don’t want anyone else to have access to it. Our IT department did the install and it literally took seconds and took longer to unpack it than install it. You can buy HP software for it but we already have several capable graphics programmes, including adobe illustrator and Photoshop which work well. The art room staff and clients enjoy being creative and their results are excellent. I don’t get to play with it much unfortunately.

The finished results are high quality as the printer produces 2400 x 1200 dpi with the tiny 4-picoliter ink drop size. The colours are excellent but we have not used any inks other than HP’s. You are able to print at draft quality as a proof first to ensure everything is right before you print out a run which does save on ink. It isn’t particularly quick to print out a sheet but the sheets art so much larger than usual sizes so it’s easy to expect too much. It takes around 6 minutes per page of A3 and around 17 minutes per page of A1 which isn’t really too bad and does give you time to do other things when printing out A1’s as it isn’t worth standing over it waiting.

The printer is suitable for both Windows and Macs although I don’t know about Vista as none of our computers other than my laptop use it