Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. - Thomas Edison
I really can't imagine why even in the past, the broad area of a solid color would be an issue with DTG. Reason being, it's not like screen printing at all. No uneven pallets, no inconsistent pressure. In fact, when I had mine, I used mine to print large areas of color often. It's all I had, so I printed all of my orders on that DTG. Now, that feel wasn't great, but I was able to do it with consistency and with no special prep. AM I an odd ball? I've never really heard of that particular subject being an issue with DTG myself. I could be mistaken.
in our experience, the washfastness is absolutely the biggest issue with DTG, and also hard to nail down. I have seen (and we have printed) plenty of shirts that look incredible off the printer, or after curing, and they are garbage after a handful of washes. the hardest part of DTG is tweaking the pretreatment step. too much, and the print looks great and will fail immediately. too little and you end up with a crappy looking print, that may also fail prematurely. finding the sweat spot and repeating it isnt easy, and it varies with every shirt brand/style/color/country of origin/etc.
Used to be that DTG was not the best decorating choice for broad areas of solid single colors. Is this still the case?Think of an almost solid 8"-10" circle of cardinal ink on a black shirt.
Quote from: Frog on December 27, 2019, 11:14:37 AMUsed to be that DTG was not the best decorating choice for broad areas of solid single colors. Is this still the case?Think of an almost solid 8"-10" circle of cardinal ink on a black shirt.Andy: An inherent issue that DTG printers have when printing solid areas of "certain" spot colors has to do with the way the print-heads are arrayed in the printer. DTG printers scan multiple passes in Bi-Directional mode to get the required lay-down across the print area. Now if you consider that the print-heads in the DTG might be arrayed in a Y, C,M,K configuration, then that is the order that the color is built, when printing in one direction. However when to printer reverses to print in the opposite direction the order that the colors are built is reversed, which can lead to banding. It's not an issue with all colors and tends to be more noticeable with colors that have a high percentage of Cyan or Magenta in them. The problem can be almost eliminated by running the printer in Uni-Directional mode, but that comes at a cost of lower production output.
I know nothing about this but if you have multiple heads could they not be oriented opposite of each other to help solve that issue? Or are all of these units using just one print head?