Digital textile printing has officially entered a new age. The global market for volume of printed textile is around 27 billion yards per year, growing at three percent. It is estimated that about 250 million yards is currently printed digitally. The growth curve of digitally printed yards has steepened over the past two to three years and it is expected that by 2016, the volume will be well over one billion yards.
Does digital textile printing finally make sense as a mainstream solution to serve the needs of the signage and other markets? Has the technology progressed to the point of it being viable to more than a few companies that have mastered its complexities? Is there a network of reliable vendors of the various components of the printing solutions? Is now the right time to jump into the business of printing on textiles digitally and is there money to be made at it? Let's take a look at the evolving digital textile market.
Fabric Advantages & Disadvantages
Dye sub transferring is a form of heat transfer process that allows you to take a digital image, print it on a sublimation printer and press it onto a garment. You must use sublimation ink, which uses a continuous-tone technology; prints are typically dry and ready to handle as soon as you remove them from the printer. This process can be used on a variety of products, from t-shirts to coasters
Printing onto fabrics in general is significantly different than printing onto paper, vinyl and films. The characteristics of the fibers of the textile being printed and how they are woven and what treatments are present all affect the printing. Considering these characteristics, there are significant advantages in printing digitally versus analog, such as sublimation printing, offset or rotogravure.
Dye sub transferring is a form of heat transfer process that allows you to take a digital image, print it on a sublimation printer and press it onto a garment. You must use sublimation ink, which uses a continuous-tone technology; prints are typically dry and ready to handle as soon as you remove them from the printer. This process can be used on a variety of products, from t-shirts to coasters
Printing onto fabrics in general is significantly different than printing onto paper, vinyl and films. The characteristics of the fibers of the textile being printed and how they are woven and what treatments are present all affect the printing. Considering these characteristics, there are significant advantages in printing digitally versus analog, such as sublimation printing, offset or rotogravure.
The most obvious advantage is reduced run sizes. Being able to print short runs at a reasonable cost enables companies to produce samples efficiently and introduce a new line of printed fabrics to measure sales potential. With the advent of faster printers, now even production runs of thousands of yards can be efficiently printed. Another major advantage is the flexibility of design. No longer does an image need to be separated into a manageable number of colors for screen printing or some other analog method.
In Europe, it is common to find designers that know the design they are creating will be going through a digital workflow so they create designs with more than 50 colors. Some claim that this actually may be a disadvantage of digital printing. Some markets that have been served by sublimation printing have a need to replenish inventory with more product. Often the orders for this replenishment are small in volume and lend themselves to digital. For example, in the home furnishing business, designs may stay in the market for more than 10 years, but as a design ages, the popularity declines.
Concerns also have been raised whether digital print output could match the sublimation printed product. It is possible to match sublimation printing with digital, and software is available to ensure the color matching is essentially exact. sublimation printing effects, such as traps and mesh artifacts, can be rendered to the image. The other two major disadvantages that have been lodged against digital printing is speed and cost and recent developments of hardware and ink have defused these issues.
With regards to signage, digitally printed fabrics for point-of-purchase applications, trade show and event decoration, and interior decoration brings the advantage of reduced weight of the printed fabric versus a vinyl substrates drastically reducing freight costs and allows for more efficient storage. The flexibility and soft hand of fabric makes it ideal for applications where the graphics will be contoured. There is an aesthetic appeal with fabric that is not possible with other substrates. This combined with the sustainable aspect of digitally printed textiles fuels the demand to the print providers.
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