Color office printers can be an incredible source of frustration, as printout after printout ends up recycled due to errors in the printing process. There are color laserprinters, but they can be expensive and are typically energy inefficient. Fortunately, HP has the PageWide Pro series, with its innovative inkjet technology. Here’s how it works.
The technology behind this new generation of inkjet printers is really changing the definition of the segment. No longer are inkjet printers the poor cousins of their fancier laser printing brethren, but with its new inkjet technology, HP has created more energy efficient and faster color printers that have lightning quick (50 pages/minute!) printouts with beautiful full-color imagery.
It all revolves around something that’s hard to fathom if you’re used to old-school inkjet printers: the HP PageWide printers move the paper under a page-wide, stationary printhead. No zip-zip-zip of the little head moving back and forth, picking up dust and getting clogged, now it’s so much more efficient that high quality full color pages push out at about 1 second/page (or faster: The PageWide 577 can print an impressive 70 pages/minute).
This means that you get true one-pass printing, the key to the increased speed. Heck, the very first generations of color inkjet printers pushed out the cyan, then the yellow, the maroon and then the black on top of it (CYMK), making them fascinating to watch, but oh, so slow. Worse, it adversely impacted the paper itself and early inkjet printouts were warped or simply weighed down by the layers of ink piled up on particularly complex images.
You can see in the below illustration that HP’s rethought the entire approach to inkjet with its “on-axis” print system:
There are far more advanced inks at play too, and each ink printhead is tiny now, really tiny. 1/5th the diameter of a human hair tiny. And there are a lot of them: 42,240 nozzles on a fixed printhead: each color (CYMK) is allocated 10,560 nozzles that are nominally overlapped, producing 1,200 nozzles-per-inch resolution.
That’s a lot of printheads to manage so the PageWide technology uses optical sensors to calibrate the printhead, measure nozzle performance, and monitor paper motion through the printer. The self-test on these printers also find nozzles that fail to perform within specifications and can catch and correct failures that can affect print quality. Which means that if one nozzle fails, the adjacent nozzles automatically compensate (what they call “passive nozzle substitution”), Since the printer has automatic printhead servicing, many nozzles can go back online automatically after the next cleaning process.
HP also uses what’s called Backscatter Drop Detection that’s built around photodetectors with both analog and digital signal processing behind the scenes, essentially testing the reflection of ink drops passing through a focused light beam, able to evaluate hundreds of nozzles per second. Pretty amazing stuff, actually. Not to mention the path that paper takes going through one of these uber-modern printers:
There’s a lot more to the HP PageWide Pro MFP-477 printer and its brethren in the PageWide and PageWide XL family, but next time you push out a printout, color or black & white, appreciate just how much amazing technology is jammed into that little device to make it work, work well, and work reliably. And if you don’t have a reliable small office color printer, scanner and copier, check out the HP PageWide Pro MFP-477 and the rest of the PageWide line.
Disclosure: HP supplied us with the PageWide Pro MFP-477 for the purposes of this writeup. I also used to work at the former parent company Hewlett-Packard, years and years ago. Not sure I need to disclose that, however!
Great ideas here, but if they continue raping us on the ink, they still deserve to lose.