Balancing speed, quality, and cost in printing applications once meant sacrificing one benefit for another. Today, HP PageWide Technology overcomes these trade-offs with revolutionary and scalable designs that deliver quality and speed together—at a significant cost advantage— based on the latest HP printing innovations built on proven technologies.

Outstanding quality and high productivity

A common expectation for digital printing is that you can’t have it all: if you need to print faster, then you should expect lower quality; if you need the highest quality, then you must accept lower productivity. Nearly a decade ago, HP’s investments in printing technology began to challenge that expectation with the introduction of HP Scalable Printing Technology—SPT. SPT includes printhead technologies, advanced inks, materials, design rules, and precision production methods based on integrated circuit manufacturing. SPT accelerated the pace of HP printing innovation by delivering printheads that are scalable in size, features, and performance while leveraging proven designs into new applications. HP PageWide Technology is the latest HP printing innovation powered by HP SPT.

By moving only the paper under a page-wide, stationary printhead, HP PageWide Technology overcomes the trade-offs between quality and speed in traditional inkjet printers. The benefits are speed and quality together with lower costs and higher energy efficiency.1,2,3 Today, HP PageWide Technology underlies the performance of HP PageWide Web Presses, HP PageWide Pro and Enterprise business printers, and HP PageWide XL large-format printers. Tomorrow, HP PageWide Technology will be used in HP’s 3D printers based on Multi Jet Fusion Technology.

Figure 1 shows the HP 841 Printhead used in HP PageWide XL printers. The S-shape of the modules allows them to be stacked seamlessly across the width of the paper to build printers in different formats. For example, eight modules are used in the D-size (A1) HP PageWide XL 8000 printer. Each module can print four colors of HP Pigment Ink in a print swath 5.08 inches (129 mm) wide. The module has on-board ink filters, pressure regulators and connectors for power, data, and ink. Used modules are easily removed and replaced by the user.4

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This printhead is built from six (6) precision-aligned HP Thermal Inkjet silicon chips—called “die”—protected by a stainless steel shroud.5 Each die has 6,336 nozzles for a total of 25,344 nozzles on the module. The native printing resolution of this printhead—1,200 dots per inch—delivers both speed and quality.

The evolution of HP PageWide innovation

Figure 2 shows the evolution of HP PageWide printheads. In 2006, the first application of HP PageWide Technology used 4.25-inch wide bi-color printheads in the HP CM8060 MFP—a workgroup multifunction color printer. This printhead has two independent ink supplies and two columns of 5,280 nozzles at 1,200 nozzles per inch (10,560 total nozzles). It can be used as a bi-color printhead or as a single-color printhead. For high-speed commercial applications served by HP PageWide Web Presses, using one color of ink in both columns provides “4-times” nozzle redundancy: four nozzles can print in each 600 dpi dot row down the web.

In 2008, the HP T300 Color Inkjet Web Press6 was introduced using 140 4.25-inch printheads in a duplex press printing a 30-inch (762 mm) web at up to 400 feet (122 m)/minute. Today, the HP PageWide Web Press T400 family use 200 HP A51 Printheads7 to print duplex at up to 800 feet (244 m)/minute on a 42-inch (1060.4 mm) web.

In 2013, the HP Latex 3000 Printer was introduced using seven (7) 4.25-inch printheads on a scanning carriage to produce a wide print swath.

Screen Shot 2016-01-05 at 2.14.13 PMBased on technology proven in HP Inkjet Web Presses—more than 100 billion pages printed since 2008 and more than 4 billion pages per month8 produced under demanding commercial printing conditions—HP’s next generation of HP PageWide Technology was introduced for business and enterprise applications in 2013 with the HP X-Series business printers. This 8.57-inch printhead incorporates significant technology advances: four colors of ink, 10,560 nozzles per color, and 1,200 nozzles per inch for a total of 42,240 nozzles on the printhead.

In 2015, HP will introduce the HP PageWide XL family of high-productivity large-format printers using the 5.08-inch HP 841 Printhead.

In 2016, HP will introduce High Definition Nozzle Architecture—HDNA—in HP PageWide Web Presses. HDNA uses the highdefinition capabilities of SPT to place low drop weight nozzles between existing (high drop weight) nozzles on the 4.25-inch printhead. This provides dual drop weight printing with twice the number of nozzles—21,120 at 2,400 nozzles per inch— for a breakthrough in quality and performance in high-speed production printing.

Reliable one-pass printing

HP PageWide Technology gets its speed by printing in a single pass, but achieving reliable quality requires innovation and advanced technologies in printheads, printhead service stations, inks, and paper transport.

To precisely place a dot of ink, each nozzle must eject a drop when it is required and within tight tolerances on speed, direction, and drop weight. A service station in the printer checks each nozzle’s performance and determines if it is operating properly. Using HP’s optical drop detectors—that can see individual drops in-flight—1000’s of nozzles can be checked every second. The service station cleans, wipes, and caps the printhead, and it can restore nozzles to operation. But if a nozzle cannot be recovered immediately, then HP PageWide Technology uses both passive and active methods to substitute good nozzles for bad ones suppressing artifacts such as white streaks down the page.

HP develops advanced pigment inks in its own laboratories to meet the unique requirements of HP PageWide Technology. HP Pigment Inks produce high black density and a wide gamut of vivid, saturated colors in a single pass. Prints are dry and ready to use right out of the printer. Compared to dye-based inks on plain and low-cost papers, HP Pigment Inks offer superior durability: resistance to damage from water, highlighters, dry smudge, and light fade.9

Inks are an essential part of reliable drop ejection. Whenever a printhead is uncapped and exposed to air, water in the ink quickly evaporates from nozzles that are about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair. If the printhead is left uncapped for more than a few seconds, the ink thickens in the nozzles making it difficult to eject a drop. Business printers and large-format printers using HP PageWide Technology can eject a few drops between pages (or large-format sheets of paper) to refresh the ink in the nozzles. However, they still must print every drop reliably for several seconds while uncapped. HP Inkjet Web Presses eject drops from every nozzle every fraction of a second on the web in the space between image frames. This technique both services the nozzles and allows built-in vision systems to evaluate nozzle performance.

In HP PageWide Technology, the accuracy of dot placement across the paper is built-in by nozzle placement on the printhead. Properly placing dots along the page requires precision mechanics to load and transport paper and sensors to coordinate drop ejection with paper motion.

HP PageWide Technology has proven reliability in the office. In two separate tests, Buyers Laboratory, Inc. found that business printers using HP PageWide Technology outperformed competitive products in reliable operation. 3,10 According to the independent-testing company, the HP Officejet Enterprise X585dn MFP printed more than 200,000 pages without failure.

Proven technologies – built to perform and last

Introducing a new technology into a business is both an investment in the future and an expression of confidence in the technology and the company that provides it. For more than three decades, HP has delivered printing solutions businesses can depend on. And, new applications of HP PageWide Technology are based on proven, reliable designs and technologies. With fewer moving parts and simple user-replacement of printheads, 4 printers using HP PageWide Technology are designed and built to be robust. They provide easy maintenance and can support high-duty print cycles— HP PageWide Pro and Enterprise printers have a recommended monthly page volume of 2,000 to 6,000 pages.11 HP PageWide business and enterprise printers and HP PageWide XL Printers reduce the amount of user intervention with large ink and paper supplies, automatic printhead servicing, automatic closed-loop printhead alignment, and automatic color calibration. Precision paper handling delivers both speed and quality with reliability users can count on during unattended operation.

Competitive costs that support your bottom lineRegardless of performance or durability, cost can often stand in the way of adopting a new technology. HP PageWide Technology eliminates this barrier by delivering low costs-per-page for both black and color printing by using low-cost papers specific to each application. For example, HP PageWide Technology and HP Pigment Inks support plain papers and ColorLok® papers in the office, coated and uncoated standard offset papers in commercial web printing, and uncoated papers and vellum in large-format printing.

Because HP PageWide Technology is scalable in width and performance, it can support a versatile range of media types, sizes, and weights to meet a variety of applications and printing cost requirements. And, total cost-per-page is kept low because the printheads are designed to deliver a long service life.

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