Most wall printers on the market are built around one or two industrial inkjet printheads. The head count is the single biggest driver of price and throughput, so it is worth understanding before you compare quotes.
What a printhead does
The printhead is the component that fires ink droplets onto the wall as the carriage moves. Each head has rows of nozzles; each row is typically assigned to one ink channel. On a wall printer the channels are cyan, magenta, yellow, black and white UV ink. The print is built up in passes as the carriage travels horizontally along the rail and steps vertically.
Single-head machines
A single-head machine (Vertiq Hypermural X, $18,900) routes all five channels through one head. It is the simplest configuration: one head to maintain, one head to replace, the lowest ink-system cost.
What it is good at: residential feature walls, logos and branding corners, mural artists who print one or two jobs a week, and operators whose constraint is selling jobs rather than printing them.
What to expect: because colour and white share a head, white-underbase jobs on dark surfaces take extra passes, and overall throughput per hour is lower than a dual-head machine.
Dual-head machines
A dual-head machine (Vertiq Hypermural Dual, $22,600, and Immersive Dual, $17,600) adds a second head. The usual arrangement separates white from the colour channels, so a white underbase and the colour image can be laid down in the same pass rather than in sequence. More nozzles firing per pass means more area covered per hour.
What it is good at: commercial work where the job is large (retail interiors, office branding, hospitality), dark or coloured surfaces that need white first, and businesses that already have a sales pipeline and are limited by machine hours.
What it costs you: a second head to clean and eventually replace, slightly more ink consumption on white-heavy work, and a higher purchase price on the Hypermural platform.
We do not quote a fixed "2× faster" multiplier because real throughput depends on resolution, pass count, surface and design. If a vendor quotes a single speed number for every job, treat it as marketing.
Wall-only vs wall-and-floor
Head count is not the only axis. The Immersive Dual is a dual-head machine that also flips to print floors (up to 4 m) — one-click switch, under 60 seconds. If your market includes retail floor graphics, event flooring, gym and school branding, that capability is worth more than the extra wall height of the Hypermural platform. If you will only ever print walls and want the tallest reach (4 m) with the simplest mechanics, the Hypermural X is the more direct choice.
Which one for which business
Questions to ask any vendor about the head
Vertiq's answers are on each model page: Hypermural X, Hypermural Dual, Immersive Dual. See all three side by side on the comparison page or ask us for the current spec sheet.