C, M, Y, and sometimes K, and others

[apetitphoto]

In https://www.printerknowledge.com/threads/always-this-messy.11901/ there were a series of comments that play along with my belief that printers may be more about the base CMY colors than all the other colors they are marketed for having. Am I personally misguided?

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

There is an overall move in the electronics industry to get you more color saturation - via various technologies , just look to the smartphone displays and their capabilities. And there was a similar move with printers - adding colors , mainly with the larger format and photo printers - colors like green, blue , orange, red, not to talk about the light colors for a different reason. An ink with a genuine green dye or pigments gives you a wider gamut in that area than a mix of yellow and cyan, that effect is easily measurable. But the question is whether it is visible at the end, whether your image uses colors just in this spectral range. It may be visible in particular cases, or only in direct comparison to a mixed green, or only on papers which yield already a wide color saturation with the base colors. So yes, the improvement is there, but......
And some people discuss another reason for the green and orange inks, the pigment yellow was the weakest ink in regards to fading, and this for a very long time, so companies were trying to reduce the usage of the yellow ink by adding the most popular mixed inks with yellow - green and orange and substituting them with genuine green and orange pigments instead. The Epsons never refuted that argument.
You may follow those considerations e.g. here
https://luminous-landscape.com/the-weakest-link/
Here a link to a pretty old presentation of the fading problem of yellow pigments
https://www.konicaminolta.com/inkjet/technology/report/pdf/icis_200205_tomotake.pdf
Recent tests by Aardenburg show that the latest generation of Epson pigment inks - for P600/800 and alike have improved very much the yellow pigment fading performance.
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com/portfolio/inks-and-media-testing-2017/
There is on last question left open whether the new 3rd party P600/800 compatible ink versions of various suppliers offer a similar improvement of the yellow inks.

 

[The Hat]

A commercial print house will only use 4 colours to reproduce photos and pictures in their everyday publications and if they used only M, C, and Y their prints would turn out looking one dimensional, very flat and uninteresting, the black is needed to reproduce the depth of field, shadows, shades and pop.

However, you can make very good prints on an inkjet printer using only C, M and Y, because of the way their technology uses the dots to reflect light, one of the reasons an inkjet 4 colour printer doesn’t use the MK black in the mix, is because the Mk black has very poor reflection quality, so its omitted.

All standard publications you pick up today only use 4 colours in their reproductions, the higher-class publications have added extra colours over the years, again because of the advancement in technology in their publication industry.

As inkjet printers evolved they too started to add extra colours into their mix, they added black magenta, cyan, green, red blue and 3 various greys, they are all used to some degree to bring a photo to life with better depth of field, shading and shadows.

This inkjet technology is way beyond my ability to understand their use of light, the way they can place a specific number of dots onto a white shinny surface to reproduce any colour they wish, it’s nothing short of breath taking, it gives far better quality than the way photo film labs use to work.

I reckon it’s a sad reflection on us humans that no matter how many extra colours they add to an inkjet printer, we automatically assume it can prints better photos, the subject in the photo tend to get left in the background and forgotten, but hey, my prints look better than yours...

I am very satisfied with just 4 colours, that’s all I need to keep the good memories in my photos a live, most would not agree however...