Inkjet Printing Glossary

In my travels I have yet to find a good glossary of inkjet printing terms, especially one that pertains to fine art printing. I am currently compiling a fine art inkjet glossary, but until I have finished it I am posting a typical inkjet glossary that can be found on the web. It's good for beginners, but those who wish to learn more really need something with more detail. I think the real reason vendors post this kind of thing is to sell printers by pretending to inform their customers. Does a glossary like the one below really tell you anything about what makes a quality inkjet print? I don't think so.

* Banding - Bands of discrete color or tone that appear when a printer can't reproduce a smooth graduation from one color to another. Instead there are noticeable jumps between one value and the next.

* Bleeding - A print distortion where adjacent colors run and merge into one another, sometimes caused by excess ink or over-absorbent paper.

* CMYK - Cyan, magenta, yellow and black - the four basic process colors used in conventional color printing. By overlaying or dithering combinations of these four inks in different proportions, a vast range of colors can be created.

* Composite colors - Colors formed by mixing various quantities of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

* Dithering - A halftoning technique/method where several dots of the primary colors are printed in various patterns to give the impression of a larger color spectrum.

* DPI - Dots per inch, the measure of a printer's resolution. The printed dots from a 600 dpi printer are far smaller than the dots created by a 300 dpi printer. As a result, the output is smoother and more detailed, while dithering patterns will deliver more realistic colors.

* Feathering - A term used to describe printed text quality. Feathering occurs when deposited ink follows the contours of the paper. Depending on the viscosity of the ink, the rougher the grain of the paper the more pronounced the feathering will be.

* Halftone - Inkjet printers don't have inks for the entire spectrum of colors; they only have the four process colors. Printers produce other colors by laying down patterns of primary color dots, varying the pattern and ratio of each color. This is known as halftoning.

* Pigment inks - While conventional inks are essentially oil-based dyes, pigment inks consist of tiny chunks of solid pigment suspended in a liquid solution. According to their proponents, such as HP which uses them for its inkjet range, pigment inks offer richer, deeper colors, and have less of a tendency to run, bleed or feather.

* True black - Black produced by a separate black ink rather than a mixture of cyan, magenta and yellow.

Pete Hellmann Photography