Wider, Faster, Better...HP Rolls Out New Inkjet Domination Tool

So this is cool, I’m thinking, but why 42" and what does that mean? What does this prodigious width—40 percent wider than HP’s own T300 and T350 machines or the widest offerings from its competitors, and twice the width of most other inkjet and EP systems on the market—mean in terms of productivity?

The 42" width equals 10 of HP’s 4.25" print heads per print bar, opening up a lot of real estate for high-volume print runs such as book publishing, one of the prime markets HP sees for its inkjet technology. A 42" web, for example, can spew out 5,000 6x9" book blocks per hour. It can print all the pages of two different titles simultaneously, dramatically shortening production times. Publishers (and the printers they contract with) see this as a huge advantage in terms of productivity. It also equates to 5,200 full-color letter-size pages per minute.

Offline finishing
Still, it’s really wide. So one of first things I thought of was finishing. It turns out that it’s really a non-issue because typical T-series customers have offline finishing or bindery operations. Moreover, there is a fairly wide range of offline finishing systems from HP partners—such as CMC, MBO, Muller Martini and others—that can accommodate 21" rolls, which is what you have when a 42" roll is slit at the rewinder. Mount the printed roll on one of the systems from these companies, set up the job and hit the start button. A few minutes later books, booklets and other materials are coming out the other end. So those two book titles that were printed at the same time can go to two separate bindery lines, accelerating overall throughput.

Or, in the case of an innovative system from Italian finishing company CMC, a printed roll can be turned into a fully personalized self-mailer ready to enter the mailstream.