Why are red, blue, and yellow inkjet primaries?
For a subtractive printing process, the ‘optimum’ primary colors for a 3-ink system would be closer to magenta, cyan, and yellow. However, these are not generally used. Why? I don’t know the precise answer but it is no doubt a tradeoff between cost and which colors are used most often. For non-photo printing, the straight red, blue, and yellow are far more useful since they can be use by themselves or in simple combination to produce a wide range of vibrant, if not realistic colors. For example, pure red is far more likely to be used for simple graphics than magenta. To make something that looks like pure red using magenta and yellow requires a precise combination – not easy to do with an inkjet printer! About inkjet printer ink No, you can’t refill your HP DeskJet cartridges with fountain pen ink! (The following is from someone who also sells inkjet refill kits so this may not be an entirely unbiased writeup.) (From: John Connolly (toner@idirect.com).) There are at least 10 ingredient
