What's The Difference Between Flatbed and Drum Plotter Printers?
Whether you’re an architect designing CAD blueprints, a cartographer making maps, or a restaurant owner designing menus, a good plotter printer is essential for making a quality finished print. Though both flatbed plotter printers and drum plotter printers offer similar printing features favorable to many printing needs, each have their niches due to differing construction and printing methods. Drum plotter printers surpass flatbed plotter printers for certain printing jobs, and vice-versa.
The Main Difference Between a Drum and Flatbed Plotter
Flatbed plotters hold the paper still while the pen moves, and drum plotters roll paper over a cylinder.
Flatbed Plotters
Flatbed plotter printers have evolved over the years to provide a greater variety of printing jobs. The original flatbed plotter printers used refillable pens fastened to a mechanical arm. The pens dropped down onto a paper roll mounted flat and unrolled to form the drawing surface. The pens moved back and forth drawing the design. These older flatbed plotter printers only produced different colors in accordance with the number of pens they held. Old flatbed plotter printers were generally used for blueprints and mechanical designs not requiring numerous colors.
Modern Flatbed Plotters Incorporate Vivid Color
Today’s flatbed plotter printers feature mechanical arms moving back and forth and left to right over fixed paper sheets as opposed to yesteryear’s unraveling paper rolls. The fixed paper allows modern flatbed plotter printers to print images equal to or smaller than the size of the flatbed. Today’s flatbed plotter printers are larger than drum plotter printers for producing large prints, drawings, and posters.
Whereas the old flatbed plotter printers were mainly used by architects and engineers, modern flatbed plotter printers are producing the large colorful prints found on today’s posters, maps, and restaurant menus.
Some of our favorite Canon flatbed plotters include:
- Canon imagePROGRAF TX-4100
- Canon iPF770
- Canon iPF785
- Canon iPF780 MFP
- Canon iPF785 MFP
- Canon iPF685
- Canon iPF780
- Canon iPF680
Drum Plotters
Drum plotter printers feature a mechanical arm limited to lateral movement on a fixed track; the pen can only draw from left to right or back and forth. Drum plotter printers use plotter paper rolls anchored on a cylindrical drum rotating beneath the pen creating image dimension. A drum plotter printer can produce images as long as an entire paper roll while the image's width is restricted to the drum’s width. While drum plotter printers are used for long graphic prints like billboards and maps, they are primarily used for line drawing prints like blueprints, engineering designs, and plotted medical information.
Though still available with pens, flatbed plotter printers and drum plotter printers have evolved with inkjets for faster printing speed and more color options. WAB Paper Supply offers two inkjet paper plotters; the HP DesignJet T610 and the HP DesignJet T1100. Architects and engineers alike love the crisp, professional CAD and GIS prints both HP DesignJet plotter printers produce. The HP DesignJet plotter printers offer large image printing speed and vivid colors light-years ahead of yesterday’s plotter printer pens.
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| Browse our wide variety of wide-format Canon plotters for high-quality development of infographics, posters and more presentation documents. Shop now | Never settle for less. Invest in a large format Epson plotter and experience the highest quality document printing. Shop now | HP DesignJet drum plotters get the most out of your marketing, able to develop superior quality blueprints, banners, posters and more. Shop now |
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