The difference between spot color printing and non-specialty printing

The difference between spot color printing and non-specialty printing
During our card-making process, there is a distinction between spot color printing and non-spot color printing. To make it easier to understand, I will explain the difference in plain language. Simply put, professional printing uses very pure colors, with no other impurities. It uses inks other than yellow, magenta, cyan, and black inks to replicate the original color of the original text. Non-spot color printing uses CMYK color values to create colors. Comparing the two, spot color printing is clearly superior to non-specialty printing.

A comprehensive comparison of spot color printing and non-specialty printing
First: The cost of spot color printing is relatively high
This is because spot colors are basically printed on site. Although spot colors are usually used only locally on the image, the price is customarily estimated at twice the price of regular ink. If the press does not have extra printing units (such as machines with fewer than four colors or four-color printers), it will take twice as long to print, resulting in higher costs.

2. High saturation of spot color printing
Ink mixed in spot color printing produces colors obtained by mixing pigments using the subtractive color method, resulting in lower brightness and higher saturation, resulting in uniform and thick ink color printing.

3. Non-specialized printing costs are relatively affordable
For customers whose color requirements are not very high, using non-spot colors is more cost-effective, because non-professionals cannot distinguish between spot color and non-spot color printing, at least in terms of sensory perception.

4. Non-specialized printing colors may vary slightly
Because non-specialized printing uses CMYK color values to create colors, which may differ somewhat from the original color, non-specialized printing is more suitable for general customers. The visual brightness of four-color printed colors is nearly straight, indicating excessive neutral gray content in the printed color. Four-color printing emphasizes increasing the saturation of reproduced colors, but at the excessively sacrificing brightness of colors, this is another major flaw of four-color printing technology. Compared to the colors of natural scenery, due to these shortcomings, four-color printing produces heavy colors, significant tonal distortion, unrealistic layering, and weak three-dimensionality. As a result, customers often complain about the low print quality.