How many colors can an ink-jet 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 color