Stinky Ink News

Colour Space and Colour Gamut

As a species, we have pretty good colour vision. Although it doesn’t extend far into the infra-red or ultra-violet spectra, it’s good enough to navigate the world we live in. The range of colours we can see, technically called the colour gamut of our vision, is quite a lot bigger than the gamut a printer can produce and, to a lesser extent, bigger than the gamut a monitor screen can display.

The way colours are represented differs between monitors and printers. With a colour monitor, colours are made up from various levels of Red, Green and Blue light – hence the term RGB – in an ‘additive’ model. This means that as you add more of each colour, the colour gets lighter and lighter until, when you have full levels of red green and blue, the screen should show white.

With a printer, though, things are rather different. Here you have three colour inks: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow, which work in a ‘subtractive’ or reflective way. The light that falls on a printed pages is absorbed or reflected in different amounts by these three inks. If you have fully-saturated prints of all three colours you get black, not white – printers rely on the white of the paper for light colours.

In fact, printer inks are not pure cyan, magenta and yellow, because it’s very hard to achieve these theoretical colours. If you mix them all you tend to get a dark, muddy brown, which is why a true black is added to the colour trio, to get the full range of colours – CMYK. K is used as an abbeviation for blacK to avoid confusion with B for Blue. In a similar way, six-colour photo printers include light cyan and light magenta inks, to improve the range of light colours they can reproduce – to extend the colour gamut for these colours.

Calibration

As you may imagine, mapping all the colours that show on a monitor screen to their equivalents on a printout isn’t an easy job, which is why you may have noticed that a photo or page design looks different – usually not as bright – when printed.

You can improve things by calibrating you monitor to your printer. Some more expensive printers come with calibration software and some high-end graphics applications, like CorelDraw do, too. They’re usually automated systems, where you select the closest matches for a series of printed colours to their equivalents on the screen, or vice versa.

An ICC profile is a standardised form of look-up table of the colours a monitor, printer, scanner or other piece of colour equipment can produce or resolve. Software, such as photo editors and graphics design tools, can use an ICC profile to determine the different shades available when displaying, printing or scanning.

If you do a lot of colour work, it’s worth running a calibration routine, so it’s less of a surprise when the colours your select from an on-screen palette are printed out. Utilities like Monitor Calibration Wizard (www.hex2bit.com) and Calibrize (www.coolsw.intel.com) will do the job of setting up your monitor (for free).

Colour spaces

If you study the rather daunting-looking diagram on this page, you can see how colour spaces work. The whole of the colourful horseshoe-shaped area represents the colours the human eye can see. You’ll notice that all three of the coloured triangles laid over this ‘colour space’ have much smaller areas. This is because neither a monitor nor a printer can get close to the full gamut of colours we can see.

The standard Red Green Blue (sRGB) triangle, with a dark blue border, is a standard colour space defined jointly by HP and Microsoft in the 1990s, to provide a standard set of colours that could be used on devices working with the Internet. Using sRGB, software and hardware developers can design their products and be reasonably sure that the colours they are using are the colours people using their software or hardware will see.

The Adobe RGB triangle, with the orange border, defines a larger colour space needed by the kind of graphics professional its products are designed for. Both these colour spaces are for monitors and use the additive colour model.

The third triangle-ish shape, bordered in yellow, is a typical CMYK colour space for an inkjet printer. As you can see, although it’s bigger than the sRGB colour space, it doesn’t extend as far into the green space as Adobe RGB.

So what happens if you try and print a photo or other colour document which uses colours that fall outside the inkjet CMYK colour space. Clearly the printer won’t be able to reproduce them accurately. It’ll have to choose a colour within its own colour space which most closely approximates to the one you’ve chosen.

This is where ICC profiles come in again, as software can compare the colours its working with, with those the profile says are available on the printer it’s using and make the best choice for mapping one to the other.

Some printer colour gamut basics

It’s no accident that the majority of photos are printed out on inkjet printers. Apart from the fact that inkjets are still quite a bit cheaper than colour laser printers, they also do a much better job of reproducing colours. Partly due to the different printing techniques, where inkjets use liquid ink, sprayed onto the paper and laser printers use powdered ink, melted onto its surface with heat, inkjet print has a much larger colour gamut than laser print.

If you compare prints of an identical photograph printed on both types of printer, you’ll notice the laser print looks exaggerated, with far less variation in some of its colours. This is particularly noticeable with things like sky and sea scenes, which involve a lot of subtle shades of blue and green. Colours that the inkjet printer can render quite naturally are much harder for a laser printer, which has fewer shades of colour to pick from.

It’s not all bad news for the colour laser, though, as its main use is in the office, where good, bold primaries are the order of the day. Even with a smaller colour gamut, these colours can be well reproduced, producing vibrant business graphics and promotional materials at much lower cost per page than from an inkjet.

|

Canon Inc, a leading printer and copier maker, said on Thursday it would spend 140 billion yen (£750 Million) to boost its capacity to make toner cartridges in light of robust demand for laser printers.

Consumable items such as toner and related services are an important source of profit for office equipment makers as they generally fetch high margins and provide a constant revenue stream.

Canon does not disclose sales of its toner cartridges, but its laser printer-related revenues, which include toner cartridge sales, totalled 1 trillion yen in calendar 2006, accounting for roughly one quarter of its total sales.

The Tokyo-based company, said it would invest 80 billion yen to build a new plant in Hita in Oita prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu by September 2009.

Canon plans to spend another 60 billion yen to lift output capacity at an existing factory in Oita city.

Are low cost Colour Laser Printers are now a better buy than Inkjet printers?

Over the course of 2007 we have seen a significant shift in the prices and entry points for colour laser printers. Recently I have seen the Samsung CLP300 colour laser printer advertised for under £100. Asda are now stocking HP Colour laserjet 1600 in their stores for sale at about £135 – pop it in your trolley!. This has prompted me to do a quick comparison of similar priced laser printers and compare their value and cost per page.

Samsung CLP300:

Samsung advertise this as the worlds lightest and smallest colour laser printer. They have achieved this by changing the technology of the laser toner cartridges. Instad of a cartridge which is the length of the printer they use a small drum of toner which clips very easily into the printer and replenshises itself as necessary using their No Nois print engine, which also promises to be very quiet. This is used in their professional series of colour printers and gives quiet operation and simple toner changes.

Print Speed is 4PPM in Colour and 17PPM in Black text mode. Available with USB and also Network connectivity, it is advertised as being installed with 4 clicks of the mouse.

The Black cartridge should give about 2,000 pages (at 5% yield) and the colours 1,000 pages each. With a set of compatible cartridges at £88 or a rainbow kit of original cartridges at just over £100 your cost per page (in colour) is:

Samsung original    £0.10

Compatible        £0.088

HP Colour Laserjet 1600:

The HP CLJ1600 colour laser printer is HP’s lowest-priced laser printer and is advertised to print at up to 8PPM in colour and black and white, with a fast first page out. The printer is advertised as having a very low noise level and is designed to fit on your desktop. Supplies are available online and again you can choose between quality remanufactured toner cartridges or HP originals. You should get about 2,500 pages from the Black at 5% yield and 2,000 pages from the Colour cartridges (again at 5% yield) and the comparative prices are:

HP Original         £0.118 per page

Remanufactured:    £0.078 per page

Both printers offer a high quality colour output, and it is a difficult choice. I personally like the design of the Samsung CLP300 a lot and would probably plump for one of those if Santa is listening

Samsung Electronics, which sees its printer business as its prime growth engine in the long run, has taken meaningful steps in that direction by striking a deal with larger corporate clients in Europe to supply 40,000 high-speed laser printers.

“We won a contract to supply a cumulative 40,000 tailored high-speed printers to government agencies and financial institutions in Europe and Southeast Asia,” a company spokesperson said on Monday.

Samsung will supply 14,000 medium-speed ML-3051ND laser printer units to Federal Pension Fund in Russia, while 12,000 will go to the Venice regional government in Italy. Samsung said 5,000 ML-3472NDK medium-speed printers will be go to France’s job agency, while 2,000 units and 1,000 units are destined for the Thailand policy agency and Malaysian policy agency, respectively.

“We have also agreed to offer a combined color printer, scanner and fax machine unit to financial institutions in Southeast Asian countries including Singapore and Malaysia,” the official added.

Samsung’s printer business has been growing 38 to 40 percent annually over the past few years, compared with an industry average of 3 to 4 percent, according to the company.

The printer business, however, still accounts for a meager 3 percent of the company’s total sales. Samsung hopes the printer business will rise 25 percent to reach around $2.5 billion in revenue by the end of the year from $2 billion last year.

Samsung is still sticking with its marketing strategy in Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand as these countries take up some 5 percent of the company’s revenue. More recently, however, the company revised its target upward to 10 percent.

After announcing rather upbeat third-quarter earnings in mid-October, Chu Woo-sik, head of Samsung Electronics’ investor relations team, told reporters that Samsung will be ideally positioned for maximum strength and profit from new growth engines such as the printer business.

Samsung finally debut two new Printers in UK

 

Samsung has finally released their new Sleek, Sexy and Slim laser printers. Designed to fit into any living room and complement the decor, the printers were conceived to be more of a style statement than the usual beige box in the corner. The new Samsung ML-1630 is “the world’s slimmest mono-laser printer” at only 11cm thick, a form factor that explains why the printer is only available as a monochrome laser. The range also includes the Samsung SCX-4500 multi-function scanner and the laser we mentioned before. Prices are £129 and £199 respectively.

In the USA Samsung were so struck be the design of the printers that they released them for sale initially only via Apple shops – one design icon to another!. I am assuming that they will be available over here through the normal channels, but this is still to be confirmed