Why not 6 or 8 color laser toner systems?

the question is, would the large amount of R&D investment required to offer 6 development systems in one engine, result in enough increased sales and aftermarket revenue to justify the expense? a possible analogy is the lack of success with 3D HDTVs is HP Indigo setting world on fire with additional colors beyond CMYK? is Okidata data seeing increased sales after launch of white toner?

Océ actually had a color system with CMYK+RGB colors. It sucked.

If you look at the color quality coming off the best machines (Canon C7010/Ricoh 651EX for example), the quality is superb, no real need to improve as it is very close to photographic/press quality.

As daninsun pointed out, I think we've reached the point of "good enough". People may be willing to pay more to get the quality of the 651ex but I doubt they'd be willing to pay 5 times more for that extra 2% increase in quality.

Also, you may have seen inkjet systems that use "light cyan" and "light magenta". Those colors are added to eliminate the harsh halftone you see when printing a "light cyan" using normal cyan ink.

Since our machines do not display halftones, such inks/toners are not necessary.

Think of it this way: Ink jet is a liquid process. When the various colors of inkjet ink are shot onto the paper they go into the surface and blend with one another and in essence create a new color on the media. This can not happen with dry toner particles.

I believe we are now producing close to the best image quality possible using dry toner particles.