Darren,
Encad has 3 ink types, GS, GA and GO. GA uses dyes that produce a wider and better behaved (blues are blue, etc) gamut, but are not compatible on an ink-for-ink basis with SWOP. That's why they came out with the GS inks, which ARE compatible with SWOP (like everyone else). There's no magic with Encad inks, they use off-the-shelf dyes and don't dry very fast. Everyone else uses the SWOP style dyes for compatibility with seperations, which far outweighs the advantages of a slightly wider gamut. Encad makes brilliant colors by oversaturating the paper and forcing the operator to deal with the drying issues. Other devices can do the same, except HP, which makes the RIP do stuff like that.
Don't let the math fool you, it is just a meaningless sales tool. Dye subs are continuous tone but have a very small gamut compared to ink-jets on glossy media. A wider gamut is not very important. What's important is that it be reasonably large and COMPATIBLE, or at least well behaved when corrected using color matching algorithms. By well behaved, I mean not prone to gamut mapping artifacts that appear when mapping gamuts where the primary inks are not very close.
LMTS is using seperate inks for RGB which give you a slightly wider gamut and less ink usage. Problem is, the biggest print quality problem with plotters is the apparent resolution, which limit the sign applications that are appropriate for the device. 8 inks won't help at all and will appear identical to a 4 color system on most jobs, where the gamut boundries are not critical. Even where the gamut boundries are critical, the difference is small when using glossy media.
6 color systems use additional ~10% dye load ink for Cyan and Magenta, which increase the population of almost invisible dots in the highlights and midtones. The result is that you see very few, if any, dots and because there are so many of them, detail is resolved that would have been lost on conventional printing because the highlight and midtone dots would be so far from each other (think stochastic screens here). The difference is dramatic to say the least.
Go look at HP's latest consumer printers (Photo print cartridge) for a peek at what I'm talking about.
-David |
