How many colors can an inkjet printer can produce?
"I use a HP680C in the office, and it have two cartridges, one for black and one for color (yellow/cian/magenta?). If the printer fire one drop of each ink at a given point, we can have only 6 different colors (ignoring white and black). If it can fire two or more drops at a given point, maybe we can have more colors, but I suspect that the printer use this to control quality of the presentation, not the number of colors. Anybody knows for sure? With dithering it can make more colors, with reduced resolution."
Like most print processes you only have a limited selection of inks to use. Full colour can be derived from three primary colors, just like a monitor. For monitors, these are Red, Green, and Blue because monitors emit light resulting in an additive color process. Inks, on the other hand, absorb light so printing is a subtractive process. The resulting inks should then be cyan (blue+green or -red), magenta (red+blue or -green), and yellow (red+green or -blue).
Therefore, the colors used in common inkjet printers are not really capable of producing true full spectrum photorealistic quality results since they are red (not magenta), blue (not cyan), and yellow. These are optimized for nice saturated primary colors when used independently. Also see the section: Why are red, blue, and yellow inkjet primaries?.
In addition, the combination of the three primary colors should be capable of being combined to produce black but due to misregistration and the pigments used, this black would be somewhat muddy and brown. Therefore, a separate black ink cartridge is normally used for black printing.
(From: Tony Hardman (AHED_CIJ@f54x19.demon.co.uk).)
With printing there are more problems than solutions and I do not know which method HP use in their printing.
If you can vary the drop size, you can change the drop spread on the paper. This can be done by firing bigger slugs of ink, or multiples of the drop at the same position. As you can figure the ink will either spread and make a bigger drop, or stay the same size and become denser. Depending on the resolution you want these could both improve colour density. This depends on two key components.. The ink, and the paper.
The problems with laying down multiple drops on paper is that if you do a large block the paper will curl up and the overall image becomes worse. This is why you can pay 1 a sheet for 'quality' paper.
Another problem with this is speed. Firing two drops in the exact same place is difficult... Unless the head is stationary but that is not good either. You may notice that most DOD printers in high resolution mode do a number of passes over the same place. This does allow dithering and other techniques for resolution / colour enhancement. They usually only print while going in one direction for improved mechanical control.
In the 1600 printer there is a heater to assist with the drying times and reduce the curling problem.
Inks are a problem too. They can dry at different times because of the different dyes used, or they may not mix how you expect if you place two colours on top of each other. Its only ink ... but to get the best balance of surface tension, drying time, viscosity, colour, stability.... and more is not as straight forward as it might seam. I have noticed that the water based inks are improving, and there are some that do not run if they get wet (after drying on the paper).
I think the spec in your manual may suggest what method they use.. The printer resolution (best) is 600dpi (I guess), and I recon the best full colour resolution is lower. Also the print head is only 300dpi so you must do two passes to get 600dpi black (single black ink cartridge). This suggests a partial step of 1/600 inch between the passes. What happens when you print black using the colour head? How many passes, how much slower? The resolutions quoted may also be 600 * 300, or what ever. If they make blocks of colour from a potential 600dpi machine, the resultant image is probably only 75dpi (possibly less). This still might be called 600dpi, because the drop placement uses this resolution, but it is not 600dpi at full colour. The resolution of quality picturers / poster is several thousand dpi, but not a variable image (not ink jet).
In the Lyra publications they did publish the real print head specifications for the machines they review. They also include some of the methods of colour printing.
After all this I have noticed that I have not answered the question of how do HP et al get their colour resolutions. All I have mentioned is a few of the parameters that the designers have to deal with.
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