Colour Printing: Today and Tomorrow

Printing high quality colour at a low cost on plain paper may seem like a pipe-dream, but it is not. Over the past several years, a lot of R&D effort has been put in by various companies into colour printer technologies, and the next few years will certainly see some of these come to fruition as products. Colour printing is available now and will be commonplace tomorrow. The challenges and problems inherent in colour printing are discussed. The basic colour printing technologies, viz., dot matrix, ink-jet, thermal transfer, and laser are elaborated. The advent of ink-jet and thermal transfer printers are considered as instrumental in increasing the quality and at the same rate lowering the cost. The predominance of true colour laser printers and other technologies, giving photographic quality printing at desktop, is predicted. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.12.2.3054