In this paper, we propose a method for color error diffusion based on the Neugebauer model for color halftone printing. The Neugebauer model expresses an arbitrary color as a trilinear interpolation of basic colors. The proposed method quantizes the color of each pixel to a basic color which minimizes an accumulated quantization error, and the quantization error is diffused to the ratios of basic colors in subsequent pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms conventional color error diffusion methods including separable method in terms of eye model-based mean squared error.