Random video of old school pen plotter in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cd3GsZlOBg
My father still fondly talks about how the crispness of a true pen plot was never really matched by modern printers.
Edit: he has them on a second page: https://szymonkaliski.com/projects/diy-pen-plotter Not as fast as the 1983 version though :)
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 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.
Vinyl is worse in every way to lossless digital. As is an analog film camera. Or a mechanical watch for keeping time. Still 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.