Having had the honour of working with India’s first few Digital Textile Printing Organisations. We were providing Digital Textile Printing solutions to Indian textile Industry, And I being a Designer and Technical person have had experienced Digital Textile Printing from the Front End as well as Back End. I have more than 20years of experience in this domain.
‘The Disadvantage’ per say wouldn’t be the right approach towards digital printing unless we evaluate it against ‘The Advantages’ Digital Printing has brought along with it.
Lets evaluate this question keeping both scenario in mind meanwhile comparing it with traditional/conventional forms of printing.
Foremost the Digital Printing on Fabrics is still in its evolving stage. It is not prime yet. However it is far better than the times 10 years back.
There are better Print heads, better electronics, better softwares, better Inks, Better Pre-treatments and Post treatments, Better Fabrics and printer Profiles and Profiling processes. However, there are still lacunas in Digital printing which have always been bothering every digital printer owner and customer. Would Like to list them as under.
- CONSISTENCY: The consistency of prints is not guaranteed in Digital Printing, the print service providers are always in dilemma to take a swatch print before going for a full round production despite of the sampling been done before. This is because the technology is complicated and very process driven. Any variation in the Process at any stage of Pretreatment(Padding) ->Printing->Post-treatment(Steaming/Curing) to washing and finishing. A minor variation in the process may bring upon a difference in the output/result.
- COLOR DENSITY: Digital printer are not able to match the density of the colors produced by Screen printing or Seperation printing. Digital print can match colors however theres a difference, when compared to the screen/seperation prints. for example while printing Digital Scarves the print side colors do not penetrate to the other side so the fabrics is dull on the back side, on screen printing the problem is less seen and the ink penetration in the fabrics is much better and the color density is better. if we increase the density on the digital print the design loss or print quality is seen to be compromised.
- Cost : Per meter cost of digital process is more when considered for production lots in comparison to screen and seperation prints. In small lots and sampling Digital printer is far convenient and cost effective than conventional forms.
- FABRIC VARIATION : different fabrics behaves differently to the colors of inks, hence, color changes are there in digital print, despite the digital print file being the same.
- EFFICIENT : Fabrics handling is still a problem in digital printing, Problem of stretch, expansion, Skewing, Distortion of Fabrics and Prints, Bowing and misalignment of print to fabrics, printing unitary pieces like shawls, stoles that have tassels at both ends need special attention while printing.
- COLOR GAMUTE: Since the Digital Printer derives all its colors majorly from the combination of CMYK inks. There are stages where the Digital printer is not able to make colors or color vibrancy that we get out of conventional printing Inks from the color kitchen. It even becomes more complicated to manage color gamute when special colors are added to the Printer and printing is not 5, 6,7 or 8 color Printing. However these additional colors do give us much better color gamute compared to just CMYK color gamute.
There are many more issue that can be listed, which are too technical to describe, which I shall cover in the forth coming blogs
