The Problem with Color

Some inkjet printers use two shades of cyan ink and two of magenta, and two shades of black, but the general principles still apply.

Here are the problems we need to overcome: If you were to purchase a red felt-tip marker from three different manufacturers (maybe Crayola, Sharpie, and a generic brand), would you expect them to produce identical results? It's true that they are all red, but each one would, in fact, be a different shade of red. Maybe a Sharpie marker would produce a darker red and a Crayola a more vivid red. Not only that, but buying two red markers from the same company doesn't even guarantee consistent results; after all, they could be from different batches or one could be older than the other.

Well, the same thing goes for printing. Each printer will deliver a slightly different result when printing the same image because the inks are slightly different, so don't expect to send the same info to an Epson and a Canon printer and get the same results. The problems don't stop there.

Would you expect a Sony television set to look the same as a Panasonic? Just take a stroll through your local electronics superstore and look at all the TVs that are tuned to the same station. Even though they are being sent the exact same signal, they all look different. That's because they all use different shades of red, green, and blue. So why would you expect two different brands of monitors to look the same? They also use different shades of RGB.