Exploring Printer Ink Colour Combinations
While printer ink may be just a line item on your budget, the way these inks work together can help you understand what you are loading into your printer every month. With a few tweaks and additions, you could save on ink cartridges and waste less toner.
Printers typically utilize variations on the three primary colours. These colours are typically Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), and Yellow (yellow). By understanding how these three work together, you can make more informed printing decisions.
Black: Black is made by combining all other colours until no one single colour can be reflected back to the eye. By combining all three primary colours in equal amounts, printers can create a colour similar to black. But because this is a crude combination, prints can often come out brown or grey. That is why, when your black printer cartridge is low, your prints come out grey. Printer cartridges come in black as well and most offices utilize black ink for their prints to create more brilliant blacks. Some offices, however, don’t need many documents to go out of the office and therefore choose to simply allow the typical CMY group to get the job done. This is not typically recommended, as black ink creates a more preferable, legible print. Black is abbreviated as K, which stands for Kohle, the German word for coal. This is so the colour spectrum RGB (Red, Green, Blue) will not be confused with the normal printer spectrum of CMYK.
Cyan: As a blue with some green in it, Cyan is used largely as a subtractive colour, removing brightness from colours, rather than adding it. It is critical to creating shadow and expressing the darker end of the colour palette. Cyan can come as its own cartridge or in a combined CMY ink cartridge.
Magenta: Unlike Cyan, Magenta contains no green at all but does contain a bit of blue. It is a subtractive colour also but helps push prints towards the middle of the colour scale. This colour can also come on its own or in a combined cartridge with Cyan and Yellow.
Yellow: Perhaps the most complex colour in the primary scale, Yellow is a blueless colour that absorbes all wavelengths of blue from light. It can mix with blue to create green at the darker end of the spectrum, but can also be combined in light or heavy doses to create a wide range of colours on the brighter end of the spectrum. This colour can appear in printers on its own or combined with Cyan and Magenta.
HP Takes Digital Printing Innovations On The Road In The UK
With a cadre of new innovations and a rock-star-style tour bus, printer ink and technology retailer HP is hitting the road, bringing printer and printer cartridge demos to destinations across the UK.
According to a statement released by HP this week, its branded truck will make eight stops between November 15th and December 2nd to showcase faster printers, more graphics capabilities and simpler HP ink cartridges.
HP will kick-off the roadshow at Sandown Park, in Esher, hitting London and Manchester along the way. The tour will also stop in Scotland; hitting the Midlands and Edinburgh. The tour concludes in Ireland with stops in Belfast and Dublin and, like true rockstars of the printing world, the tour finishes with a stadium: Curvaheen Park Stadium in Cork.
With a host of new innovations to introduce to its customers, the tradeshow will focus on recent speed upgrades for HPs T200 Inkjet Web Press, as well as the clearer graphics offered by new ink cartridges and delivery systems, introduced at tradeshows throughout this year. HP believes the faster, more efficient printers can help businesses increase profits and fill more orders, keeping up with the faster pace of commerce.
“As the graphics market shifts from analogue to digital printing, we are helping print service providers grow their businesses with new capabilities, enabling them to expand into new application areas and improve delivery times for high-volume digital printing,” Jan Riecher, vice president and general manger in graphic solutions business at HP, said Friday.