HP DesignJet 800 Remarketed Printer (

The Designjet 800 is a 24-inch aqueous inkjet plotter — the roll-fed monochrome-and-color plotter that a generation of civil and architectural offices leaned on for check prints and small bid sets. Twenty-four inches means D-size across the roll. Good for ARCH D and ANSI D drawings. Not going to give you a full 36-inch E-size sheet; that’s a different, wider class of machine.

It runs the older HP ink family — HP 10 and HP 11 color cartridges with HP 82 as the higher-capacity option, feeding separate printheads. That cartridge-and-printhead split is a blessing and a curse: you replace what dies instead of the whole assembly, but there are more parts to source on a machine HP no longer builds. Media-wise it’s flexible — it’ll take HP bond, coated, and HP Matte Film for the jobs that need dimensional stability.

This is a single-roll, single-operator plotter. That shapes everything. You feed one roll, you run your set, and when the roll runs out mid-job, somebody’s swapping it by hand. On a light week that’s fine. On the Thursday before a Friday submittal, that’s you staying late.

So the honest fit is narrow but real: a small studio or a field trailer that needs occasional D-size check prints, an archive PC that still speaks to legacy HP-GL/2, or a backup unit that keeps a bigger department running when the primary plotter is down. It becomes more compelling when you already own spare HP 82 cartridges and a shelf of the right media.

Where it’s the wrong tool: any office running steady daily volume or full E-size sets. If you need width and a scanner in the same footprint, look at a wider dual-roll model — in HP’s own line the DesignJet T918 36-in steps you up to 36 inches with MFP scanning, though it’s also discontinued. If you’d rather buy something HP still supports with parts and fresh consumables, the current-generation 24-inch Canon plotters like the Canon GP-200 24-in or the Canon iPF605 24-in are the practical cross-shop. Worth a side-by-side before you commit to legacy.

Buying used means buying someone’s mileage. Name the failure mode before the feature: on machines this age, it’s printheads, the carriage belt, and cartridge-bay contacts. None are fatal, all are wear items, and all get harder to source every year. Ask about the maintenance kit history — HP shipped service parts like HP C3869A for this platform, and you want to know what’s been replaced.

The upside is genuine. A remarketed 800 gets a proven plotter onto your floor without the commitment of a new lease, and if your volume is truly occasional, it may outlast your need for it. Just size the risk to the job. A backup print doesn’t care that the machine is old. A last-minute permit set at 4:45 cares very much.