Originally Posted by
DanK
Sorry, George. You can rightly criticize me for sloppy language in that post, but you can't use it to support your argument with Manfred.
I was using shorthand. To be more precise, I should have written something like "a good printer can produce colors outside of the sRGB gamut". It is definitely not the case that a printer has a single gamut. In much the same way, when one writes about a "wide gamut monitor," one is usually not referring to a monitor that can produce only a single gamut. My NEC arrived with something like 5 gamuts already pre-loaded, and one can create additional ones. Rather, one is referring to the widest gamut it can produce.
In the case of printers, this is quite obvious, even if one holds constant the inks that one uses. I have printed with more papers than I can recall--probably more than 25--and while the differences in gamut are often small, they are sometimes quite striking. For example, as Manfred noted, a given printer will generally produce a narrower gamut with most matte papers than with most coated papers.
The reason I recently bought a wide gamut monitor was to be able to better visualize what a print will look like while editing; my new monitor censors less of the color distribution that my printer can produce. As Manfred pointed out, that doesn't entirely solve the problem; the print is reflective, so it will look different even if there is no issue with gamut boundaries. However, it comes closer. The drawback is that it is less accurate in displaying what people will see with the much more common sRGB-limited monitors. However, I can simply touch a control on the face of the monitor to limit the gamut to sRGB to see what others will see.