Why can’t printers accurately print a highlighter color, such as neon yellow? All colors tend to be duller and not as vibrant.
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So highlighters are as bright as they are because their dye is *fluorescent* which means it absorbs non-visible light and then reflects it back as visible light. That’s why they look like the glow. It’s because they actually do glow a little bit.
Printers simply don’t use fluorescent dyes, so they can never recreate that effect.
I suspect it’s entirely possible to use ink that does fluoresce, but we it’s probably more expensive/not that useful.
Highlighters are fluorescent, printer inks are not. Fluorescent means the ink absorbs UV light and re-emits it as visible light. This makes the ink brighter than it could otherwise be.
In the simplest model, a printer can’t make colors brighter than the inks it has in it, because inks subtract light (they don’t add it). Typical printers have four colors: magenta, cyan, yellow, and black, and the colors they can make are mixes of those colors. In more technical terms, printers have a [gamut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model#/media/File:CIE1931xy_gamut_comparison.svg) of colors with the pure colors of its inks at the corners, and that gamut doesn’t cover all (or even most) possible colors (the pinkish pentagon in that image).
Covering all colors would require brighter dyes (which might be more expensive or otherwise undesirable), a larger number of pure-color inks (which adds complexity and cost), or both. Even then, a finite set of primary colors can’t produce every possible color (because the shape it draws of accessible colors can’t fit the smooth curve of the total space of possible color), although a large number of highly saturated colors can come close.
As other posters have noted, there’s an extra piece at play with highlighter ink, in that it actually *emits* (not just reflects) light via fluorescence. That is, it converts invisible UV light into visible light, and can therefore “reflect” more visible light than hits in the first place, which pure colors can never do. There’s nothing in principle stopping a printer from having fluorescent inks, but typical printers don’t.
As you’ve seen, fluorescent inks actually change a bit of invisible light into visible light (simply put), so they really are a bit brighter. That’s why the 80’s were so neon, after the pigments were available cheaply.
If you had a printer you don’t mind wrecking, you *could* have a go at gettting empty, clean cartiridges, and filling them with the guts of fluorescent markers. I mean the colours will be all over the shop, but it’ll pop more 🙂
Others have given the best answer, so I can’t add to that.
However, I will say that if you have a **REALLY** good laser printer, such as one that a large print center uses, and you use **REALLY** high quality glossy paper while printing a very high res image with the right colors and shading, it can look ***almost*** that good.
Never with a home inkjet printer, though.
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