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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

Printers using CMYK isn't strictly true, right? Aren't you able to choose the ink colors when getting prints professionally made?

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You're correct, there are some more sophisticated processes used by specialty printers such as CcMmYK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CcMmYK_color_model). Something like this will use more inks and less halftones, giving better results in some cases.

Or are you referring to other printing methods, say for example silk screening? There, you would definitely select a specific ink to use. It just depends on what your goals are.

Or they could be referring to Spot Color.

One of my favorites is spot gloss.

I had a summer job working at a print software company and they had a large format printer with, if I remember correctly, 12 different ink colours. These weren't spot colours - though that's also an example of going outside CMYK - but meant the printer supported a very wide colour gamut and subtle colour grading.

Anyway, yes, professional printing can go beyond just CMYK in various ways.

Yes, giclee printers typically have ten or more inks, and Risograph printers offer a wider but limited set of options.

"gicleé" is just a neologism that means "I will charge my customers more to recoup the capital cost of this large inkjet printer" and doesn't really have any inherent meaning as to the number of inks.

Yes. With a limited carve-out for anyone still running an Iris, who originated that neologism in a much more sceptical market.

At work we have CMYKW printers, which add an extra channel of white ink to the mix.

To print on non-white paper? But I think then the ordinary cyan, magenta and yellow inks can't be used. Normally those are translucent in order to create red, green and blue via subtractive color mixing. E.g. overlaying yellow and magenta dots creates a red dot.

But if the paper can't be assumed to be white, CMY need to be opaque, otherwise yellow on black paper would just look black. Then you can no longer create red, green and blue. So you need additional red, green and blue pigment, likewise opaque. So "CMYRGBKW". Then the other colors can be mixed via dithering the eight base colors as usual.

Or maybe your printer still needs white paper, and the white pigment has some other use?

opaque white + translucent CMY would work, assuming you can get a white formulation that doesn’t gum up the print head.

Yes, though that would mean they need to stack three drops for red, green and blue, rather than two as in CMYK. Which might create some quality issues. At least CMYK printers avoid the triple stacking for black which CMY printers would have to do. With CMYRGBKW there would be no dot stacking (subtractive color mixing) required at all, resulting in less required ink. Though needing eight base inks rather than the five in CMYKW might be a larger disadvantage.

I have a Canon Pixma Pro 100 and it uses 8 different inks. The “Pro” really means professional. When used with the correct paper, it produces the same high quality prints as any professional service.

Looking at the artwork on my wall, there’s two big things that set prints apart from an original artwork. 1. Computer software doesn’t capture the imperfection of a physical medium. 2. Printers can’t reproduce the texture of layered colors.

I wonder how much does it cost per full color letter-size print? How often do you need to clean nozzles (and how much ink is spent)?

I have Epson EcoTank, which is great since I can refill it from the ink bottles (even non-Epson), but since it gets only occasional use for color printing, almost every time I have to clean nozzles before printing in color.

I’ve had it for at least 6 years. It barely uses ink and has no problem sitting off for months. I’ve never cleaned the nozzles. I printed 40+ 13x19 (2.5 A4s) full-color prints and at least that many sketches in grayscale and only 3 cartridges got low. I’ve only replaced a full set once at a cost of $120. High-grade 13x19 paper costs $0.30 per sheet. Even factoring in that the printer cost $700, it’s already paid for itself several times.

The only real issue is it’s very slow. It takes minutes to wake up and full-color photo-quality A4 prints take at least a minute. More if you’re doing 13x19.

Now, if you’re doing fast full-color on cheap office paper, you bought the wrong printer. :)

My experience with Epson printers is they use absolute obscene amounts of ink and gum up if they get lonely.

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