ImagesMagUK_September_2020

www.images-magazine.com SEPTEMBER 2020 images 39 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT will reduce print times to under 10 seconds and can make this first- down white seem optically bright. Plus, the cost is not prohibitive. A litre of digital white will require you to mortgage your house, promise the hand of your firstborn and sign away all future record deals you may ever negotiate! I’m exaggerating of course, but the ink must contain titanium dioxide to make it white, and titanium dioxide is expensive. It is also difficult to pass through a print head and to store in a tube inside a print machine, which has caused many print shops countless problems over the years. Having said that, there are now many solutions to the ink-settling issue and recirculation systems promise to have solved this particular issue once and for all. Bear in mind, too, that almost every DTG machine applies white ink through a dedicated head with multiple outlet channels. This method threatens to add to the process time Tony Palmer has been in the garment decoration industry for over 30 years and is now an independent print consultant working closely with print shops to get the most from existing processes and techniques. Tony is passionate about keeping and enhancing production skill levels within the industry. He is the owner and consultant at Palmprint Consultants, offering practical help and assistance to garment decorators all over the globe. www.palmprintuk.com pretreatment process required for DTG – screen print ink can stick to a shirt without the aid of a separately applied binder – and gain the high-resolution CMYK prints that are achievable using digital print head technology. You’ll still require a small amount of skill to set and adjust the parameters of a good base white print. And you’ll still require reliable registration and high production speeds: computer-to-screen imaging systems can help dramatically with this, as can digital registration adjustment. There are various hybrid options available now. The most expensive machines utilise large (or multiple small) print heads to reduce printing time; the least expensive machines offer an optional digital head attachment that sits on an existing screen print machine at the expense of one of its print stations. The end game Hybrid machines will not replace screen print presses, and they will not replace the dedicated DTG machines that are on the market now. They will, however, find a home in print shops where they complement an existing operation. To be clear: hybrid is not suitable for one-off production runs, no matter how adorable the pug! It can, however, produce stunning results for the 50 to 1,000-piece market. Below 50, it’s not worth making the screens, while for jobs over 1,000 pieces you’re moving closer to the optimum for analogue only. When the ink companies can find a stable white ink that can be reliably printed onto a shirt with one screen and give double screen results; when the digital print heads are large (and affordable) enough to cover that white in one pass; and when this whole process can be applied to any substrate – then we might see the solution we are searching for. And by the time this dream machine is introduced, I will be retired and no longer needing to tell the guy in the pub that his dog is ugly and has no place on a T-shirt anyway. The least expensive hybrid option involves adding a digital head to an existing screen press as the white and colour inks cannot be applied at the same time. Screen printing the white makes sense, then, in terms of cost, time and the appearance of the finished print. By using the chassis of a screen printing press to print the white consistently and a digital print head to apply the CMYK inks onto this new white underbase, you gain the speed of screen print, lose the