6 COLOR VERSUS 4 and 5 COLOR PRINTERS  

AND NOW 7 and 8 Colors!

Yes, having six colors ink systems in a printer produces better images than four and five color systems, no doubt about it. You can produce color photographic prints that are INDISTINGUISHABLE from standard chemical processed color photographs on your $150-$200 ink jet printer on your desk at home now.  The four and five color printers are indeed a little cheaper, and you will make very nice prints, including photos. But if you want prints that are perfect, spend the extra dollars and get a six color system. No baloney here. PS, the five color printers add a "photo black" which helps the printer print grays in photos without using up the regular primary colors to blend a gray.

For your information, a six color printer adds two lighter shades of magenta and cyan (printer red and printer blue) which are used in intermediate areas of color. This provides more accuracy and finer control of color and smoother rendering of images. As it turns out, in a six color printer, these are the two colors you end up using most. So unless you have a system where you are refilling your ink cartridges or using a Continuous Flow System below, seriously consider a printer with INDEPENDENT COLOR INK CARTRIDGES, as in CANON.
 
REGARDING TEXT:  If you are printing a lot (we are talking thousands of pages) of text only, black and white documents-- for god's sake, get a Brother laser printer for that and save your inkjet printer for color prints. Anyone judging/using an ink jet printer primarily for printing large amounts of black and white text documents is out of their mind. Laser jets print this kind of thing five times faster, 100 times cheaper, and with equivalent or better quality. 

Don't buy an inkjet printer based on how quickly it cranks out text documents. This is another shortsighted error I've seen in commercial reviews of ink jet printers--  you don't expect a sedan to do the job of a pickup truck either.

HOWEVER- if you are printing a small or moderate number of text only documents, almost every single inkjet printer over $70 (and a few even cheaper) out there will do an adequate if not excellent job for you, Canon, Epson, HP, Lexmark included.

As for 7 and 8 color printers--- OH COME ON, ALREADY. Will printer manufacturers stop at NOTHING to sell new printers?!?  I'm getting kick ass color lab perfect prints on my 6 color Canon i960. Anything over 6 colors is pure overkill. Remember, every book and magazine picture on the planet is only FOUR COLORS. Enough is enough.

Some professionals  might   enjoy the advantage of 8 color printing-  but it comes  at a steep price-  more colors means  more ink to buy, more nozzles  to  clog which means    more  printer cleaning, which means more wasting ink- you can't just clean ONE COLOR - you have to waste ink cleaning all the colors.

Further, one 8 color printer,  the Epson R800, the cartridges cost $14  each  retail-- times eight colors-- and if the printer goes ONE DAY without printing, it WILL clog.  See http://www.neilslade.com/Papers/printtest.html

Your brain's OCCIPITAL LOBES see color- 

your pre-frontal cortex CREATES Blazing 4 dimensional Color

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