Big difference in some colors between printer and monitor

  • Thread starter Thread starter jersie0
  • Start date Start date
J

jersie0

I have an HP-920c printer. Yeah, it's kinda old and slow, but works
fine for my purposes. And photos printed on glossy photo paper with
it look spectacular.

BUT... there is often a wide disparity between the way some colors
look on the monitor, vs. how they print on paper. Not in photos.
Those just look great. But for example:

1) In Word, if I highlight text on the screen with the bright green or
light blue highlighter, it looks, on the screen, just like those
colors do in "real" highlighters. Then I print a document with that
color highlighting, and the highlight color is much, much darker on
paper than it looks on screen.

2) If I'm making a CD cover with Roxio/Adaptec's jewel case creator,
if I use colored text, it will usually show up on paper much darker
than it looks on screen.

Because these are two different products from two different vendors, I
know it's not a glitch in the software. Yet because the printer
prints photos that look "right" to the eye, I assume that's working
okay (in fact, if I include a photo in a Word document, it looks fine
when I print the document).

Why this color disparity, and what might I do to correct it?
 
Niether MSWord nor Roxio do much in the way of color profiling. Your
printer drive probably doesn't either. Your monitor profile is most likely
sRGB. This is the scenario for serious color mismatches.

I can't see how you can do anything about the situation.

Jim
 
What is printed is reflected light.
What is shown on the monitor is projected light.
Big difference.

Plus in general some applications handle color a whole lot differently than
others.
So what you see on the monitor is not what your going to get printed. You
can get that if you calibrate your monitor to your printer.....

But, that is a lot of hard work for a printer for under $100.
 
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