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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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.
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