They make a weird kids STEM toy that's a surprisingly well thought out pen plotter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSFW5ok3ROc&start=128

The big arms are attached to the egg thing with two magnets, so a kid shoving their hand into the moving parts is very safe; it just falls apart. And you can see the clever arrangement of the three moving parts (axis 1, axis 2, and lift/drop pen).

I have a Watercolorbot[1] which is like the world's most inexact plotter. But it's a lot of fun to watch it pick up paint on the brush and try to paint a gcode version of your design (also funny to see the patterns the slicer algo uses to try and fill blocks of color). Software was always a little fiddly, but still a fun idea.

1: https://watercolorbot.com/

> crispness of a true pen plot was never really matched by modern printers

I don't know about that. Pen plots can, at a push, achieve the equivalent of about 250dpi.

Back in the early 90s, I wrote software for the first inkjet “plotter” (a wide format printer that used HP inkjet cartridges, and rasterized HP-GL commands on the fly). Even back then, we could get 600dpi resolution, and today's printers can do up to 2400 dpi.

The point is generally no matter how high your DPI, if you're drawing a line using a series of points, compared to drawing a line via a vector process, the vector process will almost always look nicer (for some definition of nicer).

My mid-1990s Graphtec plotter has a precision of .01mm, or 2540dpi. I don't have any pens for it fine enough for that to matter though, and have yet to build a generic pen-holder (it grabs the pen with magnets...).

> I don't have any pens for it fine enough for that to matter though

Yes, that is the issue. The finest pen you could likely get would be 0.1mm (and even that would be hard to find and expensive). That is what I based the 250 dpi on.

Wait, even if the line width is broader than the resolution of the printer, wouldn't the placement of the .1mm line be accurate to the printer's resolution?

Yes, but you would not be able to distinguish two parallel lines spaced apart by minimum printer step size.

Yeah… but I think what he misses is that it’s a line drawn by a pen. It has a certain analog appeal to it?

Vinyl is worse in every way to lossless digital. As is an analog film camera. Or a mechanical watch for keeping time. Still though.