HP DesignJet 1050c Plus Remarketed

Monochrome line work. That’s the honest core of this machine’s job. CAD plots, redlines, check sets, as-builts on plain bond — the day-to-day paper an engineering department chews through between milestones. The 36-inch carriage covers standard architectural and civil sheet sizes without folding down.

It runs the HP 80 ink family with dedicated HP 80 printheads, plus the older HP C4892A and HP C4893A cartridge lines depending on how your unit is configured. Media choice is wide open — everything from HP CG890A plotter paper to matte films and coated bond is still listed for it. So consumables aren’t the problem a machine this age usually implies.

Name the failure mode first: it’s a single-roll machine. Load bond, and when a job needs vellum or a wider sheet, someone swaps the HP Media Spindle by hand. Mid-deadline, that’s a person standing at the printer instead of doing something useful. A dual-roll machine changes stock automatically. This one doesn’t.

There’s no scanner, no copy function, no built-in MFP workflow. It plots. If your team also needs to digitize old drawings or run copies, this isn’t the box for that side of the job.

And it’s dye-based color. Fine for internal checks and coordination plots. Not what you’d trust for archival as-builts that need to survive years in a tube without shifting.

If you need one machine that plots, scans and copies, look up the family instead of across it. The HP DesignJet T918 36-in is the scanner/MFP direction — same 36-inch width, but it adds the copy-and-digitize side this machine never had. It’s also discontinued, so you’d be buying it remarketed too. Worth a side-by-side if the MFP function matters: compare the 1050c Plus against the T918.

Choosing the 1050c Plus is a deliberate call: you want a plain plotter, you want it cheap to keep running, and you can live with one roll and no scanner.