HP Multi-Colour Separation Technology

In order to produce professional quality prints, it is simply not enough to offer more ink colours - it is how they are used togethre that's critical to producing the best images.

Most printable colours can be matched by many different ink combinations.  A method for separating CMYK or RGB inputs into 12 inks has a number of critical performance objectives.  It must produce a wide and useful gamut, smooth colour transitions, uniform gloss, and minimise image grain.  It must preserve highlight and shadow detail, offer excellent reproduction of greys, and reproduce skin tones that look natural at any level of brightness.

HP's colour scientists working with professional photographers and graphic artists combined both the science and art of printing to meet these objectives.  The result is HP Multi-Colour Separation Technology (or as the Yanks call it Multi-Color Separation Technology), which determines the best combination among the 12 inks for each pixel.

HP Multi-Colour Separation Technology enables a 12-ink printer to fit seamlessly into existing workflows.  To application software and RIPs, the HP Designjet Z3200 appears to be a CMYK or RGB device with a very large gamut.  Users get the colour and Black-and-White performance of HP's 12 ink system without manual editing of printer colour profiles and without having to deal with the complexity of 12 colour separations.

This technology is also used with the HP Embedded Spectrophotometer with i1 Colour Technology to generate custom ICC profiles for any compatible photo or fine art meda.