Jeffares & Green, based in Johannesburg, has recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 1050C A0 Plotter from Protea Graphics. Jeffares & Green is a consulting engineering company offering professional services in all branches of engineering. The company designs and implements engineering projects, both in the private sector as well as for local, provincial and national government.

Jeffares & Green uses the plotter mostly for CAD and GIS work. This often involves large volume, large format plotting, plotting up to 150 m per week. The CAD users plot primarily in black and white, while the GIS users use full colour. The type of drawings produced are design of roads, traffic signage, road construction, township layouts with infrastructure details, maps of pipe networks for water and sewerage, and maps of route networks, for example roads.

The features of the product that are particularly relevant to Jeffares and Green are the speed of plotting, ink cartridge size, quality of plotting, memory size, format size (A0), branding (HP), and network connectivity.

There were a number of deciding factors that motivated Jeffares and Green to purchase the HP DesignJet 1050C from Protea Graphics: firstly, the speed and ink system of the product as well as the extremely high quality based on the cartridge/printhead system, and secondly Protea Graphics' ability to provide the product at extremely competitive prices.

Steven appreciates the reliability, uptime, quality and speed of the plotter. "Because it has a larger ink cartridge we do not have to replace it every week, as we did with the HP650C. It is also very user friendly in terms of set-up, ink replacement and paper replacement."

"We have received good service from Michael Tymvios at Protea Graphics. He has been prompt and efficient and has answered all the technical questions I had," commented Steven Truman, GIS Manager at Jeffares & Green. "The product's performance to date has been extremely good. It is a lot faster than our old HP 650C, which was becoming out of date, and could not handle the file sizes that we were sometimes throwing at it. When it comes to large format plotters, I will not recommend any brand other than HP."

Protea Graphics

(011) 719 5700

kenbez@protea.co.za

www.protea.co.za