An ergonomic color image technology produces visually equally spaced 16-step output colors produces for equally spaced 16-step rgb input data on printers and on displays even in the case of different ambient light reflections on the display surface. If the output is equally spaced for example in the CIELAB space then a high visual efficiency is reached. If additionally for printers with CMYN colorants the achromatic colors are only printed by the black colorant N instead by the overprint of three chromatic colorants CMY than additionally a high material efficiency is reached. For an efficient image reproduction it is highly important to produce a relative colorimetric reproduction which is linearly spaced as function of relative CIELAB data. Therefore the definition of meaningful relative CIELAB coordinates is necessary. For this any device is described by six chromatic colors OLV and CMY. The six device colors OYLCMV form a chroma hexagon in the (a*, b*) CIELAB diagram. In the third dimension the achromatic color Black N is located at the top and White W is at the bottom.