Anybody who has purchased ink cartridges know that there is no blue or red ink. Cyan sure looks blue and Magenta definitely looks red to me so why don't they just call them blue and red instead of cyan and magenta?I'll try to clear things up a little. Monitors verses printers use different ways to produce color. A monitor is a light source while printers are light reflecting. The only common ground between a monitor and a printer is what is referred to as dithering. The definition of dithering is as follows:
A process that simulates shades of gray or color variations by differing sizes and shapes of pixel groups instead of an ordered array of halftone dots. This reduces
contrast between dots of different colors or shades and yields a more flowing, natural impression.
In other words dithering uses overlapping color dots to make colors and shades. Depending on how overlapped they are and how dots are positioned results in a controlled color output of millions of different color shades and hues.
Now back to our discussion. Monitors and printers both use primary colors, however, a monitor uses primary additive colors Red, Green and Blue while printers use primary subtractive colors Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. In both cases primary colors are dithered to form entire color spectrum. Dithering breaks a color pixel into an array of dots so that each dot is either made up of one of basic primary colors or intentionally left blank to create white.
