Indigo Light Inks: Raising the Bar for Image Quality

Abstract

With the introduction of the original 6-color Photosmart Photo Printer in 1997, HP took inkjet image quality to new heights and ushered in a new era in home photo printing. The addition of light dye-load cyan and light dye-load magenta inks increased smoothness and reduced grain, resulting in photo quality prints that rivaled or surpassed that of traditional silver halide prints. A decade later, HP is poised to do the same to the digital publishing world with its recently introduced HP Indigo Light Cyan and Light Magenta inks for the HP Indigo press 5500.In this paper, we reflect back on the innovations that Hewlett-Packard has brought to the field of photo quality inkjet printing over the past 10 years, and how we are leveraging many of these innovations into the realm of digital publishing.As a case study, we describe the process of creating a high quality photo book, a Joel Meyerowitz catalogue of vintage color prints, which was produced for the photographer's exhibit at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York in April to June 2006. In this instance, a 7-color HP Indigo press 5000, equipped with standard process CMYK inks plus light cyan, light magenta, and Pantone Cool Gray 9C was used. All text was printed using the gray ink, while images were reproduced using 7-color process CMYKcmg on the front and back covers, and 6-color process CMYKcm inside.