Staggered nozzle array.

A staggered array is what you build when one head is narrower than the job: several heads are mounted in two or more rows, each offset across the width and set back along the travel direction, until their nozzles interleave into a single continuous line. The same trick runs inside a head, where nozzle rows are offset so the spacing projected onto one line is finer than the gap between any two neighbours in a row. The offset has to be paid back in the controller, which delays firing of the downstream row by exactly the time the substrate needs to travel between rows, and head geometry is designed around that constraint: Xaar's nest architecture shapes the printhead so heads align with one another without deepening the array. Get the delay or the mechanical alignment wrong and the two halves of the image stop sitting on the same line: a solid shows a pale or dark stripe at every head join, running the length of the roll or straight down the middle of a chest print. It is easy to misread as banding, and the way to tell them apart is the spacing, because a stagger error repeats at the head-to-head pitch on the bar rather than at the pass pitch. Nothing in the RIP fixes it, so the pieces printed before anyone looked at the seam are scrap.