Originally posted by erwinx
4 vs 6 colour
extended colour gamut is always preferable for me. just print some natural scenery pics with a wide range of blues and greens. (natural blues and greens not disney-colour )
(1) How does a 4 colour printer print a significantly lighter shade of a colour thats significantly lighter than the colour of the ink? And how does it deal with the transition from this lighter shade towards darker shades....
I haven't read the dpreview comment, but maybe that guy is just printing Disney-colour pictures where gamut is irrelevant...
The gentlemen who did the comparison and posted his conclusions is called John Mills. He is the boss of Weink I think. Weink is a supplier of 3rd party inks for inkjet printers. Go to the printers and printing forum in dpreview and do a search for "john mills" and you should be able to find his post.
What he said in his post is of course subjective, and he has already been criticised by many other forum members. By the way, he used a print of his wife, thus comparing skin tones and not just Disney colours.
I am quite interested to find out for myself how much impact there is by adding the 2 photo colours. Is it just a marketing gimick by the printer companies to sell more ink? If the PC and PM colours are half the intensity of the regular C and M ink, then can the same effect be acheived with the regular C and M inks by making the ink drop size even smaller?
I supposed this is related to your question (1). How does a laser printer print shades of grey with only black toner? Half tone. By controlling the density of black dots on the white printing paper, the black dots blend with the background white when viewed at normal viewing distance to appear grey. The smaller the dots can be, the more continuous the apparent tone variation can be achieved.
By the way, by adding the photo colours, does it really extend the colour gamut, or simply increase the colour resolution acheivable within the same gamut? Since the photo colours are a lighter version of the original C and M inks, it cannot really extend the gamut of CMYK printing, am I right?