Pink? Yep. Pink.
It’s not just for girls anymore
By Noel Ward, Editor@Large
I’ve always been a fan of wide and large format printing. Even in the bad old days when it was only suitable for viewing at a distance, to my biased eye it was still doing stuff that was impractical with offset or screen printing. Since then, printheads, inks and more have vastly improved. Fine-art images have been reproduced using various inkjet technologies for some years. But fine art is possessed of a very picky audience. The middle ground, though, has been wanting, especially for color gamut. To learn more, I sat in on a Microsoft Teams presentation with Ed LaManna and Brian Coombs at Canon HQ in Melville, New York to get the latest info on some new printers that address some of the weaknesses of the mid-range machines.
In a quest to take share in this middle ground—K-12, signage, posters, quick printers, retailers and more—Canon has taken a similar path to one that worked for its fine-art printers. Most of the devices aimed at those markets took the basic CMYK, added some gray, red, a different black, sprayed in some lighter versions of magenta and cyan and images became more colorful. One problem. What this really did for schools and small printshops was add expense. Few customers in this segment were rushing to add new printers and the price points for operating the devices or selling the output were not in the right place. Canon looked at the market, the machines it was already making and decided what was really needed was a different color.
Which happened to be pink.
Pink? Seriously?
Pink. And Radiant Infusion
OK. Give me a moment before you run screaming from the room. This is not putting a Pink Panther hue on an image but of extending the color gamut by mixing pink with other colors. The result is colors that have more “pop,” which is a key part of Canon’s new imagePROGRAF GP Series, which consists of the 6-color GP-200 and 300, plus the 11-color GP-2000 and 4000.
During printing Canon’s new “Radiant Infusion” technology layers Fluorescent Pink onto the CMYK plus Matte Black inks used on the GP-200 and 300 models to create bright and soft color reproduction. The same thing happens on the GP-2000 and GP-4000 that add Orange, Green, Red, and Violet to the palette. From what I’ve seen so far, Fluorescent Pink and Radiant Infusion makes other colors more vibrant but can also help replicate brand colors that can be difficult to reproduce on a conventional inkjet printer. This can be important for quick printers and small commercial shops. read more here
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