The subject disclosure is generally directed to reducing artifacts and banding in color printing.
Color printers typically employ a plurality of inks of different primary colors to generate a spectrum of colors. For example, many color printers use four ink colors: cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y) and black (K). Color images are formed on a receiving substrate or medium by placing combinations of zero or more dots of C, M, Y or K ink at each pixel location. However, since dot placement can be less than ideal, various artifacts such as banding can occur.
On solid ink printers, jet to jet variation can be the main cause of banding. Differences in dot position errors between the jets cause black dots to overlap adjacent color dots more in some printed columns than others. For the locations where there is more black overlapping, the color will lose more chroma. Different amounts of black overlapping produce different colors, resulting in vertical colored bands.