Using a plotter for drawing is cheap, very slow, and higly unreliable, meaning that all kind of fatal failures or happy accidents may happen at any time, intrinsic to the physical nature of the process.
Using a printer is expensive, very fast, and highly reliable, and failures are only the result of poor planning. The micro-droplets/paper interaction is minimal, dull and boring.Each piece is just one in a stack, a commodity, and artficial rules must be clearly stated to limit the edition. The result is therefore anonymous and one can barely hope to get the high cost of inks back in art value.
Well printers are likely better for photography I suppose, but not for drawing. I will use printers more to document my work or to test visual ideas and software, than to publish new work (and this, only in a very restricted way and special projects). But I know, "Il ne faut jamais dire fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau."
An interesting and rich field to discover will be of course to combine drawing, etching and other real paper marking actions with digital actions, including printing. The SP4000 seems to be quite off schedule; it was announced for Oct. 03.
9:49:53 PM.
