recommendations for a printer, or printers?

I have an HP 2550 color printer, which I use for making circuit boards as well as regular printing. I've seen ads for their new HP 2600, but I can't say anything from experience. Mine was $600 or $700, I forget, but the 2600 is only $400.

They're postscript, no problem there.

I just printed a test sheet: a 4" square is within a few mils (as best I can measure) of true.

Note that paper expands when heated; this will distort your boards also. What you want to do is make a calibration board, measure

Good point. It's also been suggested that pre-heating the paper, by sending it through the printer one or more times, printing only a dot at two opposite corners (for example), might reduce the tendency for the final print run to be distorted.

With an old HP LaserJet 4 that I use for PCB patterns, I've only found any distortion effects to be a problem when printing patterns for boards that are longer than about six inches, in the paper-feed direction (i.e. I don't have any problem with my 6-inch boards, but do have to compensate for distortion problems with 10-inch boards). And, since I still usually only make PCBs for through-hole parts and usually use minimum spacings of 25 mils, the main problem with the distortion is only that it can make the two patterns for a two-sided PCB distort too much to align well-enough with each other. But that can usually be overcome by making sure that the corresponding parts of the two patterns go through the printer in the same sequence, i.e. so the distortion effects are the same (in the same places) for both.

There is a ton of discussion about solutions for such problems in the archive of the Homebrew_PCBs discussion group, at

Regards,

Tom Gootee

"He who lives in a glass house" should not invite "he who is without sin".

Mick,

You should probably also ask this question in the Homebrew_PCBs discussion group, at

Regards,

Tom Gootee

"He who lives in a glass house" should not invite "he who is without sin".

To quote from the HP web site

Print languages, std. Host-based (uses the processing power and resources of your computer to process the print job. No PCL or PostScript)

Now the Linux folk may have written support for it but not from HP. To quote the HP site again.

Network operating systems supported Windows 98 SE, Me (driver only), 2000, Server 2003, XP Home, XP Professional; Mac OS X v 10.2 and higher

Well, I'll never buy one then. I'm not going to support a product that's too stupid to do its own job, especially when computing power is so cheap these days.

OTOH the 2550N works just fine with all my Linux machines.

Thanks but web-based forums are *awful* to use. Let me know when yahoo sets up an NNTP gateway or something.

Mick.