Personalized Decoration Using Digital Transfer Technology (I)

Understand the digital transfer technology of production equipment, materials and process methods, and how to use the technology to gain revenue.

Does your company often reject customers because they want fewer prints than you can accept? How many potential orders are there because your company can't meet the customer's product decoration company? Whether you are a textile printing, decorative advertising company, or a signboard printing company, you may have encountered many business opportunities in this or that way.

Here we introduce a new technology that meets the short-term decoration needs and expands the company's business scope without the need to invest a lot of money. This is digital transfer technology.

What is digital transfer technology?

Digital transfer is a thermally transferable image that is designed by a computer and exported from a digital printing device to a carrier (usually in the form of a transfer sheet) in a certain format. During printing, the image is transferred from the carrier to the final substrate by a thermal transfer printer. This is the same way that the plastisol is transferred onto the T-shirt by screen printing.

Digital transfer can be achieved with a variety of printers, including desktop inkjet printers, laser printers, and thermal wax printers; color, wide-format hot wax, and inkjet printers can also produce digital transfer products. But which one is best for a good system? This depends on the type of product you want to produce and the characteristics of the product you expect. Before making the right choice of equipment, you need to be able to distinguish between the major digital transfer technologies and their working principles.

The main transfer type

If you are trying to categorize digital transfer technology, you can start with the printing toners used in the equipment. The equipment can be divided into two categories: sublimation dyes and surface toners.

Sublimation dyes can be used for cartridges for inkjet printers, toners for laser printers, and ribbons for thermal transfer printers. The term "sublimation" refers to the direct conversion from a solid material to a gas without going through the usual liquid phase. Sublimation dyes convert from solids to gases by thermal conversion and are absorbed by polyester and some acrylic materials to become permanent images.

Sublimation dyes react only with polyester materials, thus limiting the product range of digital transfer technology. For example, 100% cotton garments cannot accept sublimation pigments, and nonporous surfaces without a layer of polyester cannot accept sublimation pigments. Later in this article, we will talk about how manufacturers are working around these limitations.

Sublimation dyes are transparent natural colors, so they are only suitable for white and light-colored substrates. No matter what kind of printer, they always use CMYK's ink color set.

Surface toner is a traditional toner, toner, and ribbon system used in inkjet printers, laser printers, and thermal transfer printers. These materials are mandated by traditional pigments or dyes and do not have to penetrate the surface of the material like sublimation dyes. Instead, these inks rely on a polymer-coated transfer paper that releases the image onto the surface coating during thermal conversion. The transfer paper coating is fused to the final print surface, effectively forming an image between the print material and the coating.

The thermal transfer technology based on toner is usually an ink cartridge, toner, and ribbon composed of four basic colors of CMYK. Some inkjet printers use an additional shade to extend the color gamut. In addition, thermal transfer printers often provide spot color ribbon pigments.

Special transfer technology

Sublimation dyes and traditional toners are used on different types of thermal transfer equipment. This will be described below.

Thermal transfer printer. Thermal transfer equipment uses heated print heads and pressure to transfer color wax or sublimation ink from the ribbon to the substrate. The thermal transfer equipment has a width of 40 inches from 18 inches.

When a hot wax ribbon is used to produce a thermal transfer product, the image is first transferred to a transfer paper and then the image on the transfer paper is transferred to the final substrate.

Thermal wax transfer is best applied to substrates such as textiles, where the wax and coating can penetrate well into the openings and crevices of the textile, hold it on the textile material, and ensure that the printed image does not come off. On non-porous materials, the wax and coating cannot form a firm bond with the surface of the material, and the image ink layer transferred to the surface of the substrate can be easily scraped off.

If you use thermal wax transfer technology for garment printing, remember that paper coatings will make the garment surface harder and look heavier and harder than traditional screen printing. Some customers will not be satisfied with the results of this feature. The products produced by the thermal wax transfer system also reflect the unique dot pattern of the imaging resolution of the output device.

Desktop inkjet printing systems, such as Epson's products, have become the main equipment for digital transfer printing. Although digital transfer for apparel textiles can be copied to coated paper using the printer's standard cartridge set, sublimation inks are used to produce prints and extend the range of imageable products.

Most thermal transfer printers support sublimation dye ribbons in addition to hot wax ribbons. In fact, when desktop desktop printers were first introduced in the early 1990s to produce transfer products, the most popular system was based on thermal transfer technology. There were two types of sublimation systems at the time: one was based on single-heavy or first-generation sublimation dyes (true-sublimation systems) and the other was based on double or second-generation sublimation dyes.

On a pure sublimation system (ie, the first generation sublimation system), the sublimation dye is transferred from the ribbon to the uncoated transfer paper through a medium (dry resin or wax). The temperature at this stage is lower than the temperature required for the sublimation dye. When these dyes are applied to the final substrate, sublimation of the dyes is completed at a higher temperature during the heat conversion process.

For systems that rely on second-generation sublimation dyes, the dyes are sublimated to transfer paper coated with polyester. The prints are sublimated for a second time on a thermal transfer printer, where the images are eventually transferred to the surface of the polyester on the substrate.

Due to the dual sublimation process, the color produced by the second-generation sublimation system is not sufficiently bright. However, because of the double diffusion, the effect of the diffusion of the dye particles delivered by the printer is better, and the printing quality is closer to the quality of the photos.