1. A method of halftone-independent characterization of color printers, comprising: initially printing and measuring a complete color patch set comprising all possible (N) binary 2×2 patterns printable by a P-colorant printer, where N, P are both integers, in order to produce an initial set of measurements in a perceptual color space; performing a multidimensional clustering that partitions the complete patch set into K clusters, where K is an integer less than N, and produces a reduced set of K color patches, wherein each patch is a representative member of a cluster; decomposing each of the said K color patches as overlaps of L basis binary 2×2 patterns where L is less than K, and wherein each of the basis binary 2×2 patterns contain fewer colorants than the color binary patterns in the complete patch set; at run-time, printing and measuring the said L binary 2×2 color patterns within the reduced patch set; predicting K color measurements in the reduced patch set using the color measurements of the said L basis binary 2×2 color patterns to predict and a multiplicative reflectance model; predicting the color measurements of the complete set of N binary 2×2 patterns using said predicted K color measurements of the reduced patch set and cluster membership information; and deriving a P-colorant 2×2 binary printer model using said predicted measurements.