"We need to be brave enough to challenge the status quo," states Fran?ois Martin as he introduces the updated Designjet range, with which HP expects to take a shot across the bow of the reprographics market. The company's head of marketing for GSB at the global level continues: "The future will not be an extrapolation of the present; this simply won't happen. The products we are announcing will change this field in a radical way."

Acknowledging that single-colour, toner-based LED is still the leading force in this field in terms of price and productivity, HP's initial launches focus more on quality graphics reproduction. Its T3500, which is available world-wide as of now, supposedly matches LED for cost while providing a greener print. Its T7200 device – currently on the market in the USA – claims to be the most productive engine in HP's Designjet line-up to date, with increased data handling abilities and three-roll system both significant factors in the creation of a package that can deliver up to 600m of output unattended. Likewise, its Smartstream software, which has a release date of June 30th 2014, is intended to provide an end-to-end PDF management process that can control multiple printers while delivering significant reductions in job preparation.

These three products are all gnawing around the edge of LED's dominance of the lower end of reprographics, but none of the new options is truly able to challenge this technology for price and speed when printing in monochrome. It is in this core market of copy shops, CAD, GIS and repro that HP sees an opportunity to replace LED and upset the nascent Memjet generation – and it thinks it has found the solution with PageWide.

The Barcelona demonstration of its as-yet unnamed prototype for this market gave enough to provide a fair insight as to the specifications of the finished product when makes it launches in the second half of 2015.

The key aspect of this is HP's new modular stackable head. Featuring a 5.08" (12.9cm) swath and 1,200 nozzles per inch, the CMYK head is set out in an overlapping 'S' shape, allowing multiple units to be stacked together using three mechanical alignment pads. The device uses pigment inks with a film-forming agent to bypass recapping issues, guaranteeing a smoother ink flow. This ability to create a single-pass print bar of various sizes – the 1.06m prototype uses eight of them – suggests that head could well be requisitioned for a variety of widths and requirements, including wide-format graphic arts and the indoor aqueous applications.

The combination of the pigment formulation and three dryers contained within the machine provides quick-drying output, although it remains to be seen upon what substrates the aqueous pigment ink is capable of printing.

One curiosity of the engine is HP's plan to use Adobe's APPE rendering engine as a built-in component rather than a digital front end. The company claims that this will give users flexibility in how they process files, although it is unclear as to how exactly this will work in a business that uses an alternative DFE to power its devices.

There are undoubtedly issues that must be resolved: the feeding system still seems to have a couple of glitches resulting in the occasional crumpled substrate, for example. Regardless, the combination of features on the PageWide prototype – if all the elements are delivered according to promise – could offer both black and white and colour printing at a speed unmatchable by the current machinery for AEC and reprographics, thus genuinely challenging toner-based LED monochrome printing, while also competing with technologies based on Memjet's Waterfall heads, including the Océ ColorWave and the Fuji Xerox DocuWide.

Why has HP chosen to stage its grand unveiling now, over a year ahead of its official release? According to Martin, it is a case of giving the market time to react to the new technology: "Often, LED printers are purchased on a three- or five-year contract; we've timed the announcement so customers have time to anticipate the product's release before they commit to lengthy contracts," he claims. "It is 18 months before shipping, but we wouldn't have announced this if we were not entirely confident of delivering."

The manner of how the PageWide device will be sold is another area in which HP is looking to innovate; it is currently in discussions with its channel partners to create a flexible sales methodology that allows the customer to choose how the machine is purchased.

It's an interesting prospect, but the long game that HP seems to be playing is even more intriguing. "2019 – watch this space," recommends Dr Ross Allen, its senior technology specialist for printing technology platforms, in reference to the company's expectation that it will continue to follow Moore's law in doubling the performance of its thermal ink-jet printers every two years. It could well be that this is just be the tip of the iceberg of HP's plans for PageWide technology.