5 years ago, 100% plastisol. 2.5 years ago, 75% plastisol 25% WB/DC. Today, 99% Plastisol. I tried running a simple HSA white last week on 100% poly performance shirts and I quit after 15 minutes of dealing with the ink drying up in the stencil. I put some One Stroke .357 in there and finished the job.
I have lots of issues with WB/DC because we print on so many different shirt materials and plastisol works on every damn one of them and I don't have to "test, test, test" because I've already done more testing around here the last 2 years than most shops would do in 25 years.
One thing I've done a good bit recently is WB black. Doing a straight black-only print on any color is about as rare as a unicorn but the times we do get them I'll throw whatever brand this gallon of WB black is that I got from River City some months ago and run the hell out of it. And we've printed maybe 10K hybrid (DC base, plastisol top) over the years and I'd say maybe 100K discharge white prints. But I really dislike the pre-press labor that goes into WB/DC screens, and because I believe in being honest with you guys 100% of the time, I don't trust a screen for a WB/DC job burned on any LED expo unit in existence.
Another reason why we have stuck with plastisol is because we've progressed our print quality so that rarely do we have a print that leaves this shop that would be considered a heavy handed ink deposit. There are some that due to the large amount of open stencil area that you can't get the opacity you want without putting a thicker layer of ink down. With thin thread mesh & high shear printing techniques we're getting 100% opacity with, in many cases, an ink deposit that is around half of what it was just 2-3 years ago.
I do hope that the new inks they are developing will someday become as opaque as plastisol and we won't all need a 12 color press to do a 3 color design on darks at 800-900/hr. I don't want to double stroke, I don't want to have 2 screens of the exact same color just to get the opacity we're after, and I don't want to run the underbase twice before we put down our top colors.
Until the new inks start to impress me we'll continue to get better with plastisol and we'll continue to push the limits of what plastisol can do.
