Establishing the required specifications for a printhead is a balancing act between jetting performance, physical interfaces of the printhead and application requirements for building a quality printer. Selecting tolerances impacts printhead cost and system cost. This paper will review the tolerance and performance specification and metrics of the Dimatix Sapphire printhead, analyze drop placement errors as a function of these tolerances and examine how tolerances can be balanced to take advantage of the capability of some of the tolerances. Some tolerances can be balanced within the assembly; others can be used to improve overall performance of the printer itself, or to open tolerance requirements on the printer.An example of this is the straightness capability in the cross process direction. The maximum standard deviation of straightness for the Sapphire is 3.5 milliradians. This is the highest value allowed for any given printhead. Overall, however, the distribution of this parameter is very tight for the measured population. Using a Weibull distribution to describe the population, the majority of printheads have a standard deviation better the 2.0. Very good straightness can be balanced with the tolerances on the registration features of the printhead to the frame, which potentially reduces the cost of these features. Other options can be to increase the standoff of the head over the substrate to open up the possibilities for substrates, or to reduce the tolerances for the media handling.