HP L 5 manual Color Printing Overview, Introduction

1 Color Printing

Overview

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of color printing with Hewlett-Packard printers. A primary goal for HP color printers has always been WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) color, where the color displayed on the screen while creating a document is the same as the color in the printed document. However, this goal has been very difficult to realize due to a number of factors such as:

•Some colors that can be shown on a computer display cannot be reproduced by a printer.

•The Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow colors used to create the colors specified in a document can differ in hue and quality from printer to printer, even printers from the same manufacturer. Furthermore, the colors produced by a given printer can change over time, due to internal changes as well as temperature and humidity.

Until recently, these and other problems have led HP to approach color matching by presenting a PCL 5 color command set giving users the ability to make both major and minor color print quality adjustments.

However, the emergence of sRGB (standard Red Green Blue) as an international color data standard and the growing sophistication of Hewlett-Packard printers has allowed HP to provide high quality WYSIWYG color documents with a much simpler PCL color command set. Therefore, this manual has two main parts: Chapters 1 through 7 present the latest, simplified PCL 5 color command set, and the appendices describe the command set described in Chapters 1 through 4 as they are supported by the Color LaserJet, Color LaserJet 5, DeskJet 1200C, and DeskJet 1600C printers.

Chapters 5 – 7 pertain to both sets of printers.

EN Color Printing Overview 1-1