Four Color Printing

4 Color Printing

There are many techniques for printing in color, specific graphic processes and industrial equipment are used for mass reproduction of color images on paper. In most industrial or commercial printing, the technique used to print full-color images, such as color photographs, is referred to as four-color-process printing, because four inks are used: three primary colors plus black. The "subtractive" primary ink colors are cyan, a bright blue; magenta, a vivid red-purple; and yellow; which are abbreviated as CMYK.

Variations on 4 color printing printers

The cheaper printers have 2 cartridges; one black and the other containg the 3 colours. Although cheaper to buy initially they are more expensive to run if you do a lot of printing. Mid range and more expensive printers will have separate cartridges for each of the colors, ie have 4 separate cartridges in the printer. If you are printing a fair bit then these printers although having a higher startup cost are usually much cheaper to run over time. The size and cost of the separate cartridges can make major savings, as well as reducing the wastage involved with a tri-color cartridge if you run out of just one color.