Xerox Phaser 8400 User Guide

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Your printer and monitor generate color quite differently. Your printer produces prints using a 
series of dots in three primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. When equal amounts of 
these three colors are overlaid, the resulting color is black. 

The printer can overlay two colors to produce a third color. For example, magenta and yellow 
produce red. Cyan and magenta produce blue. It overlays cyan and magenta to produce blue. 
To produce less saturated colors the printer “mixes” white by leaving some dots unprinted. 
Mixing magenta with unprinted dots produces pink.

By overlaying two or more primaries, the printer generates a palette of eight colors. Although 
equal portions of the three primary colors form black, your printer includes black ink to 
produce very dense black for images with a large amount of black text or black backgrounds. 
These four colors—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black—represent the color system known as 
CMYK.

Your monitor projects color onto the screen. The three primary colors the monitor projects are 
red, green, and blue. When equal portions of these three colors are projected, they produce 
white. These three colors represent the color system known as RGB.

The surface of your monitor consists of thousands of phosphor dots. To produce red, the 
monitor projects red phosphors. To produce a less saturated hue of red (pink) the monitor turns 
on two out of three of the red phosphors. Printers add unprinted white dots to produce less 
saturated colors, while monitors turn on fewer phosphors.

Another important difference between your printer and monitor is the way each one translates 
light. Paper reflects light, while monitors emit light. Because of these different methods, 
printers have one range of colors and monitors have a different range of colors.