As turnaround times get faster, the need for speed becomes acute. Output devices need to be faster than ever, and nowhere has this been more true than in wide-format printing. The very nature of the beast—really big stuff—has made speed, and speed without sacrificing quality, the perennial challenge for equipment manufacturers and print providers alike. Today’s wide-format printers are as fast as ever—but are they fast enough?

One solution to the speed issue has been to use “one-pass” or “single-pass” printing. Digital printing systems can be loosely grouped into two broad categories: single-pass and multi-pass. (This applies to both toner as well as inkjet, but we will confine the present discussion to inkjet.) In multi-pass printing, used by the majority of devices on the market, an image is created by multiple printheads going over the same image several times. In single-pass, the substrate moves under the stationary printheads and imaging is performed in, as the phrase indicates, a single pass. The advantage to multi-pass is that its inherent redundancy is more forgiving quality-wise; if a single nozzle happens to be clogged or fails to fire, other nozzles can cover for it. A disadvantage to multi-pass, however, can be speed. 

It’s thus speed that makes single-pass attractive, but there remains the issue of having gaps or missing pixels in the output if there is a nozzle issue. It’s like live TV: you have one chance to get a line right.