Hewlett-Packard is the king of printing, and its new printers are king-sized. The new HP PageWide XL large-format printers can print giant color posters at a speed of up to 30 pages per minute.
Ramon Pastor, vice president and general manager of HP large format design and 3D printing, said in a web event today the new color and black-and-white printers are targeted at enterprises with graphics departments, commercial printers, and other professionals.
It's not something you're going to use at home. But it's pretty impressive technology for the super-sized printer users out there. HP said 200 engineers worked on the technology, creating more than 150 prototypes. HP has 100 patents on the technology, and it tested it with more than 100 customers.
HP said there are 25,344 nozzles spraying ink on a page per module, with eight modules per printer, for a total of 202,752 nozzles per printer. The nozzles can drop 3,650 million drops per second.
The speeds range from 8 pages per minute for the low-end PageWide XL 4000 to 30 pages per minute for the PageWide XL 8000. The PageWide XL 8000 will be out in September, and other models will debut in November 2015 and January 2016. The print heads will last for hundreds of meters of printed media.
"It's a very interesting value proposition," Pastor said. "These are the fastest printers ever in the large format market."
The speeds are up to 60 percent faster than the fastest monochrome light-emitting diode (LED) printer, HP said. The ink cartridges for the high-end PageWide XL 8000 machines can print up to six rolls of paper, or 3,900 feet. Pricing isn't available yet.
