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Thanks mentioning acrylics. Now I'm wondering if new technology will eventually improve our printing to allow better colors in news media, and even in prints in art exhibits?

Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?

by m30471 hours ago|

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The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years.

In the back of my mind, I find it oddly surprising that we have 3D printers but I haven't seen a printer where you can mix your own pigments and print with them.

Many years ago I knew someone in Seattle who made microprints with burnished copper plates, some of them with a dozen different colors. He designed a couple of commemorative postage stamp-like objects, and that somehow got him hired by an eastern european country as an anti-counterfeiting advisor and then he disappeared.

by anfilt43 minutes ago|

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Offset printing can have more colors than CYMK. Sometimes a setup will include multiple additional inks beyond CYMK to produce a color or effect that CYMK alone can't produce. Sometimes those colors will be mixed from other colors as well much like paint.

Problem is offset printing presses are HUGE and expensive and require making plates first. There are digital offset presses, but they generally can't have an other stage added like traditional offset printing, it's capped at however many colors that machine has built in. They also are huge compared to other printers people will have at home or the office.

-EDIT- It is probably possible to scale down the hardware and do something like digital offset presses. I think it would cool if there was a *small* printer people could connect multiple color stages like a legos and mix up a colors for those stages.