HP DesignJet 100

The Designjet 100 was built for a single seat: one architect, one engineer, the occasional check plot before a set went out to a real reprographics house. It’s a thermal inkjet on roll and cut-sheet media, and it prints on a wide range of HP stock — bond, coated, gloss proofing, the works.

What it is not is a production plotter. There’s no dual roll here, no unattended overnight stacking, no scanner. One roll. Manual reloads. You stand at the tray for anything longer than a couple of D-size sheets. On a normal day that’s fine. On the afternoon a permit set is due, it’s a bottleneck you’ll feel.

The strength of a machine like this is that it sits at your desk and answers to nobody. No queue. No chargeback code. You send a drawing, you get a check print, you mark it up. For redlines, layout studies and personal proofs, that immediacy matters more than speed on paper.

The trouble is age. Ink and printhead supply for the HP 10 and HP 11 families is thinning, and every legacy inkjet has the same failure mode: a clogged head on a Friday and no next-day part. If this machine handles anything a deadline depends on, you need a plan B before you need it.

If plotting has become a shared, deadline-driven job — multiple people, mixed-size sets, scan-and-copy in the mix — this class of machine is the wrong tool. A wider, multi-roll workhorse with a scanner belongs in that seat. In our own catalog that role goes to the HP DesignJet T918 36-in, a 36-inch MFP built for shared print rooms (note: that model is itself discontinued, so treat it as installed-base guidance, not a new purchase). Worth a side-by-side if you’re weighing a move: compare the two.