What goes on inside one, and whats different about professional printers?
There are many different ways to create prints besides your basic inkjet printer.
How Does Printing Work?
These colors, often called process colors, mix to create a broad color range for paper printing.
Coincidentally, monitors and image files also have color gamuts, created by similar methods.
Ideally, youll want to create multiple copies, thereby offsetting the time invested in the initial setup.
Lets take a few minutes to understand some of the different ways prints are made.
Both Inkjet and LaserJet printers employ the CMYK method and are limited to that particular color gamut.
Because the inks are sprayed onto the paper, they are necessarily liquid.
This has various weak points, as moisture can warp papers, and wet inks tend to smear.
There are, however, dry methods for desktop printing, such as Laser printers.
Laser printers use a process called Xerography, which uses static electricity and physics to create images.
This graphic created by Wikipedia userYzmodoes an excellent job of explaining the basic ideas behind Xerography.
You may have seen round, cylindrical drums inside your laser printers.
This means that fluorescent colors, impossible with Laser printers and Inkjets, are possible with lithography.
Lets briefly take a look at how and why that is.
Modern offset presses do not use lithography stones, but rather metal plates with similar hydrophobic/hydrophilic properties.
Because of this plate-per color style of printing, a printer can have specific colors beyond the CMYK set.
However, as colors are added, the difficulty in printing an image rises.
