Tech hnical white e paper HP P Pag geWide Te echnolog gy Features and user bene efits Based on o reliable HP Thermaal Inkjet Teechnology aand HP pigment inks, HP PageWide P Technolog T gy offers high quality at high printing mance speeds. It is scalable to meeet a wide raange of appplication and perform ments, and d offers rob bust operation with eeconomical print prod duction. requirem Introdu uction In 2006, HP introduced a verrsatile 4.25-inch h Thermal Inkjet pprinthead platfoorm that has beeen used in wide w writing systems in HP’s large e format Latex Printers and in HP P Color Inkjet Weeb Presses.1 HP Scalable Printing g Technology alllows this printhead to o be customized to a wide range of applications iincluding different drop weights and inks. In 201 13, HP introduced HP H PageWide Technology in a hig gh-performancee family of desktoop multifunction n printers: the HP P Officejet Pro X-Series. Usin ng an 8.57-inch, 4-color 4 printhead these MFPs arre capable printinng up to 42 US LLetter A/A4 pagees per minute.2 HP Large Fo ormat PageWide Technology Prin nters—a family oof high-producti vity 40-inch (1,0 016 mm) color p printers for technical graaphics and repro oduction servicess—have unique operating and p erformance requ uirements that aare not optimally y provided by HP’s 4.25- and 8.57-inch 8 printhead platforms. For example, thee 4.25-inch printthead delivers 1 or 2 colors of ink, and makking a wide 4-color printer by staacking these prinntheads along annd across the weeb (of printing m material) requires a print zone larger than desiirable for a techn nical graphics pr inter. The four-ccolor 8.57-inch p printhead module was not designed to be stackable or user-replaceablle. Both the strengths and limittations of these earlier e generatioons of wide printtheads provided an opportunity tto develop a new w HP printhead platform: the HP PageWide Prrinthead with a 55.08-inch (127.5 mm) print swath. de Thermal Inkjet printheads aree shown to scale in Figure 1. Notte that each usess multiple, Three generrations of HP wid staggered HP H Thermal Inkjet chips—called “dies.” “ Dies are pprecision-alignedd and placed on a dimensionallyy-stable substrate prroviding mechan nical alignment, ink supply channnels, and electric al interconnectio on. Both the 8.5 57-inch and 5.08inch printheads have a stainless steel shroud surrounding thhe dies. This com mponent facilitattes capping and servicing the nd protects the dies d from media strikes during cuut-sheet loadingg/unloading and printing. printhead an Figure 1 - Th hree generationss of wide HP Theermal Inkjet printtheads From initial conception, HP’ss 5.08-inch printhead was designned to be an elem ment of a scalab ble and versatile writing system that could power a wide range of high-perfo ormance HP Pag eWide printing ssolutions. Scalable describes a d design w modules are a repeated alo ong and across thhe print zone to support a rangee of formats and features such as philosophy where 1 2 For example, this t is the HP A51 Printhead for HP Color Inkjet Web Presses aand the HP 881 Printhhead in the HP Latex 3000 Printer. Based on ISO print p speed for the HP Officejet Pro X576d dw MFP. Maximum pprint speed is up to 70 0 ppm color and blacck. Click h here to verify the e latest version off this document Techniccal white paper | HP PageWide Technolog gy nks and higher prrint speeds. Mod dularity includes the printhead, i nk delivery systeem, printhead drrive electronics, additional in and the image-processing pipeline. p Versatillity comes from the capability too customize drop p generators to d deliver the drop weights required by the application, media, and a inks as well as the ability to use a range of w water-based HP pigment inks. A new printhead p platform for f HP Pag geWide printing Performance objectives and features for HP PageWide Printtheads were drivven both by the n needs of HP PageeWide Technology Printers and exttensibility to futu ure HP PageWidee printing solutioons: • High sustained drop ratess for reliable prin nt quality in high productivity appplications; • Reliable drop d ejection to reduce r print quality defects from m “nozzle outs”; • Extended d time between service s station cyycles for sustain ed productivity; • High printt density in high--speed, one-passs printing for higgh black/color saaturation at high h productivity; • Long life to reduce interveention rates and d provide lower t otal cost of operration in high duty-cycle applicattions; d dot placement accuracy to meeet the requiremeents of technical graphics; • Improved • Stackabiliity for a more co ompact 4-color print p zone with thhe versatility to ssupport a range of print widths; • Compact print zone for beetter media conttrol, precise coloor-to-color alignm ment, and to red duce printer size. Printhead de esigns, ink deliveery systems, ink technologies, seervice station funnctions, and matterials proven in service by HP’s 4.25-inch an nd 8.57-inch prin ntheads were levveraged into the HP PageWide P rinthead Modulee, shown in Figurre 2. Figure 2 – HP PageWide Prin nthead Module ng are key speciffications and features of the HP P PageWide Printhhead: The followin 5.08 8-inch (129mm) print swath HP Thermal Inkjet technology t 3 4-ccolors (CMYK), HP P PageWide Pigm ment Inks 1,20 00 nozzles per in nch native resolu ution 25,344 nozzles perr printhead 6,33 36 nozzles per co olor Modular, stackable design for scalable printing g solutions Userr replaceable witthout tools or m mechanical adjustments Built-in ink filtration n and pressure regulation Desiigned for sustain ned, high-speed printing Improved stackability is obtaained by the “S-sshape” design off the modules. TThis shape allow ws them to fit tog gether in a compact, lin near printbar sho own in Figure 3. Printing configu rations of differeent widths are avvailable in 5-inch h increments. For instance e, eight HP PageW Wide Printheads are stacked toggether to make a 40-inch printbaar, but scalabilityy supports narrower or wider formats. 3 2 HP PageWide Pigment Inks are desscribed in the compan nion White Paper: Inkks for HP PageWide Te Technology, June 2014. Techniccal white paper | HP PageWide Technolog gy Figure 3 - Sttackability and sccalability es for 4-color printing are shown n schematically i n Figure 4. Fourr HP 4.25-inch prrintheads produce an 8-inch Two scheme print swath and two HP PageWide Printhead ds produce a 10--inch swath. Thee arrangement o of printheads is sshown to relative e scale. ompact print zon ne Figure 4 - Co When the 4.25-inch printheaads are configured to print two ccolors of ink, twoo printheads are required along tthe paper feed g system. In HP’’s Color Inkjet Weeb Presses, this is implemented with two tandem m printbars. direction in a 4-color printing Unlike HP PaageWide Printheeads, HP’s 4.25-inch printheads w were not designeed to directly staack together and d so they must be staggered and offset as sho own in Figure 4. de Printheads staack together on a single printbarr to provide a moore compact prin nt zone. A compact print zone HP PageWid gives better control of the media m during prin nting. For exampple, maintaining precise spacing between the printheads and the e m importan nt both to dot plaacement accuraccy and to prevent the media from m striking (and media—on the order of 1 mm—is t printhead. When W the nozzle arrays for each iink are placed cloose together, an nd especially wheen all are on the damaging) the same die, co olor-to-color alig gnment is easier to maintain beccause dot placem ment errors from m media deformaation and skew are reduced. This is importaant when using water-based w inkss on plain paperss, because thesee papers can sweell—“wet cockle”—an nd stretch when water w is applied.. One-pass printing While one-p pass printing offeers high throughput, it faces manny challenges coompared to the sscanning printhead designs used in HP’s large e-format Designjjet printers. Tab ble 1 outlines som me of the differeences between sscanning and pag gewide printhead d configuratio ons. Table 1 – Co omparison of scaanning and pagewide writing sysstems Scanniing printheads HP PageWide Tech hnology Printhead mo otion Bi-direectional scanning acrosss the print zone Fixed, spans the p print zone Media motion n Interm mittent, precision position advan ce Continuous, precision velocity control 3 Technical white paper | HP PageWide Technology Print modes Typically 1-16 passes 1-pass, different media feed rates Printhead servicing and decap management May spit in spittoon after each scan (~2 sec) Spit-on-page, decap up to 10 minutes Error hiding Multiple passes, nozzle substitution Good nozzles substitute for out-of-spec nozzles Maximum drops/sec 0.2 billion (HP T7200) 3.7 billion (40-inch printbar) These characteristics of pagewide writing systems will be discussed in more detail in the following sections. Inks for HP PageWide printing HP developed a new generation of water-based pigment inks to meet the unique requirements of pagewide, technical graphics printing. In particular, high black and color densities must be produced in a single pass with lower ink loadings compared to scanning printhead printers. Multi-pass print modes in scanning printhead systems limit wet dot-to-dot interactions by allowing ink to penetrate and spread between printhead passes. Several seconds can elapse between scans before a dot is printed next to its neighbor. This can allow higher ink loading than possible in a single pass because the ink is partially-absorbed between passes. Typically, it takes about 100 milliseconds for a drop of water-based ink to wet and begin to spread and absorb on the media surface. In HP PageWide Technology, all the drops from each die are printed in a single-pass and within about 5 milliseconds at typical media feed rates. So, all ink interactions are wet-on-wet, and this is a challenge for ink design to control color bleed, feathering, and mottling in area-fills and images. “Decap” performance—where the printhead is uncapped and does not have access to a service station for a clean and wipe cycle—is critical to pagewide printhead reliability and image quality. Without properly managing the effects of decap, print quality defects from slow, weak, or misdirected drops may quickly become visible. Scanning printhead printers typically spit a few drops from each nozzle into a service station spittoon every few seconds. In high-productivity applications, a pagewide printhead must operate reliably for several minutes without a visiting the printhead service station. Ink design plays an important role in this capability. New HP PageWide Pigment Inks were formulated to meet these requirements. A companion Technical White Paper, Inks for HP PageWide Technology, discusses ink performance requirements and innovations in design of inks for HP Large Format PageWide Printers. Media A technical graphics printer must support a range of media commonly found in practical applications. These media include bond paper, vellum, thick bond paper, low-cost photo papers, poster papers, natural tracing papers, and polypropylene. HP PageWide Pigment Inks were designed to provide high line, text, and graphics quality on these materials. Ink delivery system HP PageWide Pigment Inks will be supplied in 400ml and 775ml cartridges. For unattended, high-productivity printing, some models of HP Large Format PageWide Technology Printers feature two sets of C, M, Y, and K cartridges. In dualcartridge systems, the printer detects when a cartridge is out-of-ink and this triggers an automatic ink cartridge switchover. The operator can replace used cartridges while the printer is running. When an ink cartridge is pressurized with air, ink is forced through tubes to the printbar and into an ink distribution system along the printbar. Flexible supply tubes allow the printbar to move vertically during servicing and capping. Each printhead interfaces with an ink supply module. Ink supply modules are stackable and interconnect with each other to make a pagewide ink manifold. This scalable design allows printbars of different widths to be built by stacking together printhead and ink supply modules. Each printhead is connected to its ink supply module with a needle and septum for each color. The four (4) ink ports on the printhead module are shown in Figure 2. A sheathed needle on the printhead module engages a septum on the ink supply module as the printhead is pushed and latched into place. Manual handling of ink tubes is eliminated. 4 Techniccal white paper | HP PageWide Technolog gy Printhe ead serviciing In a pagewid de printhead, nozzzles are subjectted to extended decap time and can be fully-serrviced only by intterrupting printing. Wh hen servicing is required, r the prin ntbar is automattically retracted ffrom its printing position so thatt the service station mod dule can operate in the space bettween the printhhead and the media. The printheeads are also cap pped in this retracted po osition. The time req quired for serviciing may reduce productivity p und er high use condditions, and so it should be perfo ormed as infrequentlyy as possible. Ussually, servicing can be performeed while the prinnter is idle. HP PageWide Printheeads and HP PageWide Pigment Inks are designed for con ntinuous printingg for up to 10 minutes. t issues presentted by extendedd decap time andd infrequent acceess to the servicee station involves An element of the solution to spitting ink onto o the media while w printing. So-called “spit-onn-page” (SoP) seervicing refreshees the ink in the n nozzles. If dropss from every nozzle n are placed randomly, and d not too many aare required, then SoP effects aree practically invissible to the user. HP PageWid de Technology acchieves robust operation by com mbining a low rate of SoP with thee properties of H HP PageWide Pigment Inkks designed for sustained printing g and longer deccap times.3 Wiping the nozzles The service station componeents are shown schematically s in Figure 5. Printhhead nozzles and d the protective shroud are wiped by scaanning across th he printbar during g a service cycle . The service staation has a user--replaceable casssette containing g a web of abssorbent material. This wipes thee printheads andd absorbs ink ejected from spittin ng and drop deteection. The web is pulled p over a spring-loaded wipee roller that pressses the web agaainst the printheaads. The web ad dvances from a supply roll to a take-up roll providing p fresh material m while inn contact with thee nozzles. The ccartridge is desig gned for d the printer’s usser interface nottifies the operatoor when the web b has been consu umed. hundreds off wipe cycles, and Figure 5 – Scanning service station s with web b wipe cassette aand optical drop detector Testing the t nozzles The nozzless fire drops onto the absorbent web w through an ooptical drop deteector module. Th he optical drop d detector is mounted ab bove the web wip pe cassette. Thee module containns twelve (12) paairs of LEDs and photodetectors allowing measureme ent of multiple no ozzles at the sam me time. On-boaard signal processing electronicss digitize and pro ocess the measureme ent data to determine the health of each nozzle aas the service staation scans acro oss the printbar. The error rate for failing to o detect a missing drop is 1 part per p billion. All prrinthead nozzless—202,752—caan be tested in a minute. Nonfunctioning nozzles are flagged in a “nozzle-out” lookup tabble used by the im mage processing g pipeline for acttive nozzle substitution. Capping the nozzless A cap on the e printbar rotatess into place to caap the printhead s when the printtbar is retracted from the print zone. Features on the prote ective shroud allo ow the cap to seelf-align and sea l around the diess. The cap provides a humid envvironment to keep nozzle es healthy and reeady to print. Printer and a printhea ad calibratio on A three-channel densitometter developed byy HP is mounted on the bottom oof the scanning sservice station. T This sensor is D Officejet, and Photosm mart printers. It pperforms three important functio ons. used in HP Designjet, 5 Techniccal white paper | HP PageWide Technolog gy Edge detecttion during media loading For proper im mage placement, the sensor locates the edges oof the media as i t is loaded into tthe print zone. ((A separate topof-form sen nsor measures th he position of thee leading edge.) Printhead alignment a along g and across the e sheet Adjacent die es overlap by 48 nozzles. A dot interference patttern is printed annd scanned. Thee lightest patch ccorresponding to o a particular selection of nozzles indicates the best alignmennt of nozzles in thhe overlap zone. p color calibration Closed-loop This is a die--to-die color den nsity calibration relating r input levvels to output prrint densities. Eaach die prints mu ultiple levels of each primary color in a test pattern. p Using illlumination that gives the highesst signal-to-noisse ratio for each color (e.g., a blue LED is used to illuminate yelllow patches), th he reflection den sity is measuredd. Compensation n is applied in thee image processing pipeline p to each die to produce th he most uniform m color across th e printbar. Error hiiding in on ne-pass prrinting Essential to achieving high quality q in one-pass printing is rel iable drop ejecti on and nozzle su ubstitution. HP PageWide Printheads and a HP PageWide Pigment Inks were w designed toogether for reliable drop ejection n. HP Thermal In nkjet’s capability to produce high h drop rates and a its high nozzzle density of 1,2200 nozzles per inch provide botth active and passsive nozzle substitution to suppress thee effects of failed d nozzles. A faileed nozzle could leave an unprintted dot row alon ng the media feed direction. Fo or example, this could be seen as a white streak in a black area ffill. The choice of o where to placee ink drops to produce smooth teext and lines andd area-fills of a sspecified densityy—as well as the e selection of nozzles to substitute for a failed d nozzle—involvves sophisticatedd algorithms to ccontrol ink load aand to minimize image artifaacts (such as edg ge roughness in text t and lines, im mage grain, and bbanding). Passive nozzle substitution makes direct use of HP Thermall Inkjet’s high nozzle density: if a nozzle fails, thee surrounding nozzles com mpensate for thee missing dot row w. Two neighborr nozzles are onlly 1/1,200th of an inch (21 um) frrom the center of the missin ng dot row. The dot size from HP PageWide Prinntheads allows innk to spread from m adjacent dot rrows to make a nozzle failurre practically invisible. Passive nozzle n substitutioon suppresses pprint defects betw ween service staation cycles, where bad nozzles n can eitheer be recovered or o a persistent faailure identified aand flagged by tthe drop detecto or. In the latter case, active nozzle substituttion is employed d. Active nozzlle substitution usses a “nozzle-ou ut” lookup table compiled from ddrop detection m measurements. S Some nozzles may remain out while otherss recover after printhead p servicinng. The lookup ttable is processeed to select neighbor nozzles to a appropriate lo ocations to comp pensate for a misssing nozzle. eject drops at Media drive d More than 20 years of HP Deesignjet product development prrovided assets foor building a high-precision med dia transport for ormat PageWide Technology Prin nters. The mediaa drive consists oof six (6) perforaated belts backed d up by three (3) HP Large Fo print platenss. Under each pllaten is a plenum m that is partiallyy-evacuated by a vacuum fan. This provides precise media hold-down and co ontrol of printhead-to-media spaacing. The vacuuum in each plenuum is controlled by a pressure seensor. The media drive d system is sh hown schematiccally in Figure 6. Figure 6 –Me edia drive system m 6 Techniccal white paper | HP PageWide Technolog gy The belts are driven by a fixeed drive pulley on o the output sid e of the print zoone using a DC seervo motor with a digital encoder put side is encodded by an analogg encoder, and iss pushed away frrom the drive and transmission. The idler pulley on the inp pulley by fou ur (4) tensioner springs. s The pullleys have guidinng grooves for thhe belts to supprress lateral motion. The analog encoder, e signal-processing electtronics, and sophhisticated algoritthms predict when the belt (and media) will be at the next dott position, and th his information iss used to synchroonize drop eject ion from the prin ntheads. The media path p outside the print zone includ des mechanics too transport meddia from rolls in tthe media draweers, cut the media to length, fe eed the media intto the print zonee, feed the mediaa through an opttional dryer after printing, and ejject the printed sheet into th he proper outputt device (i.e., bassket, stacker, or ffolder). While mediaa is being fed into o the print zone, a slack loop—ccalled a “media bbubble”—is creatted to decouple forces in the media supplly system from the t media drive. This isolation iss important to suuppress banding from media velo ocity variations in the print zon ne. The media bubble also allow ws the trailing ed ge of the media to halt momenttarily as it is cut eexiting the media a drawer. Image processing p g pipeline HP leverage ed assets originally developed for high-bandwidtth image processsing in HP’s famiily of Color Inkjett Web Presses. These 4-color presses print on webs as widee as 42 inches (1 ,067 mm) at speeds up to 600 ffeet (244 m) perr minute. nts for a 40-inch technical color graphics g printer— —such as low haardware cost, hig gh integrated fun nctionality, high Requiremen sustained drrop rates, and exxtensibility to wid der (and more) pprintbars—drovee key advances in electronics hardware, imaging algorithms, and data processsing architecturees. The result iss a new generatioon of scalable an nd extendable im mage processing solutions with capabilities to o support a wide range of HP PaggeWide Technoloogy Printers. ustrated in Figuree 7. To give a seense of the amouunt of data proceessing required tto print an Image data processing is illu P Techno ology in an HP Laarge Format PaggeWide Technoloogy Printer is com mpared to a mon nochrome image, HP PageWide pagewide LE ED printer and a scanning TIJ—H HP Thermal Inkjeet—printer, for example the HP T T7200 Designjett printer. In a monoch hrome LED printeer, only about 80 0 operations are performed on eeach pixel compaared to 1,100 operations on each h pixel in a collor inkjet printer.. HP Large Form mat PageWide Teechnology Printers process about 7.5-times as m many pixels per second as a pagewide mono o LED printer and d 19-times as m any pixels per seecond as the HP Designjet T7200 0 printer. Figure 7 - Co omparison of image processing performance p The modular architecture off the image proceessing pipeline ffor HP Large For mat Pagewide P Printers is shown n schematically in n Figure 8. Wiider (or narrower) printbars can be b built by addinng (or removing) print module co ontrollers. As witth the printhead and ink supp ply modules, thee image processing pipeline is moodular and scalaable along the prrintbar. By addin ng hub controllers for f each printbarr, multiple printbars can be suppoorted in future pproduct platform ms. The digital front end (DFE) of o HP PageWide Technology T Printters employs thee latest version o of the Adobe® reendering engine—the e raster image processor (RIP). This T ensures tha t the rendered ooutput to the prin nt engine contro oller is completely compliant with PDF P specification ns. The Linux-baased DFE uses Inntel® CoreTM i3 or i7 processors. r PDF filees along with layo out and impositiion instructions ffrom the HP Dessignjet SmartStreeam job preview The printer receives and submitttal application. Processing P PDF files f in the printeer—compared too using an extern nal RIP—significaantly reduces the amount of data to be sent to the printer and ensures thaat the printer do es not “run out o of data” while prrinting under high h network loading conditions. 7 Figure 8 - Sccalable image prrocessing architeecture Throughout the image proceessing pipeline, microcontrollers m s and custom FP GAs—Field-Prog grammable Gatee Arrays— a data manageement tasks. FP PGAs run HP algoorithms at speed ds up to 190 billio on perform imaage processing and operations/ssec. To control th he printheads an nd other function ns, the print engiine controller deelivers up to 8 gig gabits/sec of datta to the hub controller on n the printbar. Up U to 2 Gb/sec caan be returned too the print enginne controller. This information iss produced by the drop detecto or, the printhead ds, and other writing system sen sors including thhe analog and digital encoders on the media drive. Summa ary HP’s vertical integration in th he R&D and man nufacture of inkjeet printheads, inks, writing systeems, and image p processing dvanced, integratted printing soluutions. underlies the design and devvelopment of ad de Technology acchieves productivity significantlyy higher than cann be obtained witth scanning printthead systems. HP PageWid The reliable operation of mo ore than 200,000 0 nozzles arrangged over a 40-in ch printbar invollves many challeenges in the design, deve elopment, and in ntegration of prin ntheads, inks, prrinthead servicin g, nozzle testing g, writing system ms, and the image processing pipeline. p HP PageWid de Pigment Inks are a a new generation of HP pigm ment inks design ed for single-pass, pagewide priinting. They produce high black optical density and high color saturation and allow HP PaageWide Printheeads to operate rreliably with s cycles to deliver sustained, high-quality pproductivity. infrequent service HP PageWid de Technology in the new family of HP Large Form mplementation of o mat PageWide TTechnology Printters is the first im a third-gene eration HP Therm mal Inkjet printing platform that w will form the fouundation for HP ssolutions—now and in the future—offe ering high-speed d, reliable, robusst, and economiccal printing on a w wide range of m media. HP PageW Wide Technology solutions are scalable and versatile in design n and performannce to meet the nneeds of a broad d range of appliccations in office, p commercial, and industrial printing. © Copy right 2014 Hewlett-P Packard Developmen nt Company, L.P. The information containeed herein is subject too change without nottice. The only warran nties for ducts and services are e set forth in the express warranty statem ments accompanying such products and sservices. Nothing hereein should be constru ued as HP prod constitu uting an additional wa arranty. HP shall not be liable for technicaal or editorial errors or o omissions containeed herein. June 20 014
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