The notion of a superb Giclee Print may be subjective but there are several objective aspects one can consider. Do your prints have a wide "gamet" of color? Gamet is the ability to print a wider range of colors. Printers that print with more inks produce a wider gamet. There is a large variety of professional wide format printers on the market capable of making Giclee Prints. However they can vary considerably in terms of the number of ink cartridges they use in printing. The less expensive are 4 color printers that use the 3 basic colors, cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks. The next step up are 6 color printers printers that add an extra cyan and magenta (both a light and darker color). After that there are 8 color printers that have 3 tonalities of cyan and magenta (light, medium, and dark) with 1 black and 1 yellow. Then there are 12 color printers with 1 black, 3 cyan, 3 magenta, 1 yellow, 1 blue, 1 green, 2 orange. A variation is a 11 color set by Colorspan that uses 4 tones of black, 3 cyan, 3 magenta and one yellow. Stan uses this set for his quality printing.

There are quite a few wide format printers available to make Giclee Prints. The most well known manufacturers are Epson, HP, Mimaki Mutoh, Rowland, Colorspan, and more recently Canon. Some of these come in different sizes to accommodate different width media. Two of the most popular are Epson and HP. Epson, in addition to popular desktop printers, makes a 17 inch, 24 inch, and 44 inch wide format printer and prints in 6 colors. They advertise 8 colors but it is still a 6 color printer with two magenta and two cyan's and three variations of black. However they print with two blacks only at a time on different surface media. HP makes a 17 inch, 24 inch and 50 inch wide format printer and is a full 8 color printer with 3 cyan and 3 magenta inks. Mimaki makes a 6 color 60 inch wide printer, Mutoh makes both 6 and 8 color printers from 37 to 86 inch widths, and Rowland makes both 8 and 12 color printers in 54 to 64 inch widths. MacDermid Colorspan makes a 72 inch wide printer only that can print with either 8, 11 or 12 colors which makes it very versatile.

The more color variations of ink the smoother the colors will appear and the wider the gamut range of colors. For example if there is only 1 cyan ink the only way to print lighter tones of cyan is to have fewer dots of cyan ink spaced more widely apart. But when there are 3 tones of cyan (light, medium and dark) then in light cyan areas of the print the printer can lay down more dots of light cyan closely together to achieve a smoother tonality. Additionally mixing different tones of inks will allow for more subtle variations of color which more closely matches the subtle gradations of tone in the digital file itself.

It is always a struggle to get a print to match what one sees on the computer screen in an image editing program like Adobe Photoshop. The reason is that in Photoshop if one has a typical 24 bit image this translates into millions of colors. Therefore the job of the printer is to print an image on media that comes closest to matching the original 24 bit image. But the printer is really not able to produce all the tonal gradations of the actual image as it is limited by needing to mix dots of colors (called dithering) to get these variations. The best way for the printer to do this is to have more tones of the basic colors (cyan magenta and yellow) to work with. Consequently it is the printer with more inks that can come closer to duplicating the gamut of the actual digital image. This means that a 6 color printer will make a print with a wider range of colors than a 4 color printer, the 8 color printer will have a wider range than the 6 color printer, and a 11 color or 12 color will have the best range.

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