A printer is disclosed. The printer has a print engine that mounts a first printhead and a second printhead adjacent to the first printhead in a staggered line of overlapping printheads. Each printhead has at least one row of nozzles. The blending nozzles in the first printhead overlap with blending nozzles in the second printhead. When printing, the non-overlapping nozzles in the first printhead use a default ink modulation amount and the blending nozzles in both printheads use a scaled ink modulation amount.