CHINESE TRADITIONAL CULTURE---Dye Sublimation Printing for Dragon Boat Festival

Falling on the 5th day of the 5th month according to Chinese lunar calendar, the Dragon Boat Festival is one of great significance. It has been held annually for more than 2,000 years and is notable for its educational influence.
       
      Dragon Boat Festival

The festival commemorates the patriotic poet Qu Yuan (340-278 BC), and also acts as a chance for Chinese people to build their bodies and dispel diseases. Many legends circulate around the festival but the most popular is the legend of Qu Yuan.
Many traditional customs and activities are held on the specified day by people in China and even by some people in neighboring countries. Among these customs are dragon boat racing, eating zongzi, wearing a perfume pouch, tying five-color silk thread and hanging mug wort leaves and calamus.

Dragon boats are thus named because the fore and stern of the boat is in a shape of traditional Chinese dragon. A team of people works the oars in a bid to reach the destination before the other teams. One team member sits at the front of the boat beating a drum in order to maintain morale and ensure that the rowers keep in time with one another.
We can decorate dragon boat by ourselves with dye sublimation printing. The flags and T-shirts also can be produced by us.

Dye sublimation printers are known for their high quality photographic output. As the technology continues to be improved, dye sublimation printers are bringing cost-effective high quality digital printing into the mainstream.
Dye sublimation printing starts with films that contain dyes. This will either be a single four layered film with cyan, magenta, yellow, and gray pigments or four separate films for each color. Because the films contain the pigments, they will appear red, blue, green, and gray.

During the printing process, the films are placed on the paper and heated up by the print head. This will cause the pigments to leave the film and enter into the paper where it cools re-solidifies. This is the "sublimation" part. Sublimation means to heat something and turn it into a vapor, then to form it back into a solid. Because the pigments go from solid, to gas, and back to solid, there is little mess compared to ink.

There are two factors that contribute to the quality of dye sub printers. The first is continuous tone, and the other is in-dithered color.
The color produced by a dye-sub is the result of the mixing of pigments to get the actual color. This is in contrast to most other printing methods which use a tight group of colored dots which, when seen by the human eye from a distance, appear to be a color (a process known as "dithering"). Under magnification, the dots are clearly different colors, and when seen close up with the naked eye the picture appears grainy. Because only one color needs to be printed (instead of up to four), a dye sub can place more dots on a paper. It takes a 1200 dpi printer to get the resolution a 300 dpi dye-sub printer is capable of.
Another difference that helps is that because the color sublimes on the paper instead of being laid down as little dots, the edges of each pixel are blurred. This gives the impression of blending for a more natural appearance. Dots from an inkjet leave large white gaps in between pixels, giving the impression of a grain.

Since longevity is something we all want from our photographs, it's also comforting to know that because dyes sublimate into the paper instead of just being painted onto its surface, dye sub prints tend to resist fading and are often colorfast. Using special dyes and papers allow them to last even longer.
For more information, click here: http://www.sublihouse.com/