Primary colors in printing are red, blue, green and black. When purchasing a color ribbon for your printer, you will need to know whether you want the primary assortment of colors on the ribbon or the process assortment.
Process colors have a unique quality because they can be combined to form a rainbow of other colors.
The range of hues and subtlety of tones that can be created from the process colors are vast. Primary colors, on the other hand, cannot be combined to create other colors. A single primary color ribbon will only be able to produce the original four colors on the ribbon. For this reason, process color ribbons outsell primary ribbons by a margin of four to one. To visually determine the difference between primary and process ribbons, look for the yellow color strip.