Big Picture - September 2016 - 16

inside output Dye to Be Different Why dye-sublimation printing on rigid materials may be the next best offering for your print shop. | by Craig Miller BIG PICTURE September 2016 P ictographics began printing on fabric with dyesublimation ink 20 years ago thanks to RasterGraphics electrostatic printers. While e-stat printers are a bit of a throwback, they were wonderful back in the day. They were also the closest things in print technology to "rocket science" I have ever experienced. E-stats were exceptional because they printed at about 650 square feet an hour, a big step up from 10 square feet an hour via the inkjet printers of those days. We had three e-stats in-house, which gave us tremendous production capacity. The best thing about them was that we could switch between direct print/wet transfer, vinyl wraps, and dye sublimation on any of the machines in about 20 minutes simply by swapping toners and giving the machine a quick cleaning. The worst thing about them was they could only print to about 54 inches wide. And now to the rocket science part: I won't go into the complicated details, but if you were going to achieve the best image quality and maintain it throughout the day, you had to employ seriously talented technicians who could perform color, toner, and electrical-charge management. Our technicians were up to the challenge, and that separated us from the ordinary shops. I miss that. Now, almost anyone can print stunning graphics consistently and easily. During the first decade of printing dye-sublimated fabrics, there wasn't much competition. At one point, we were the only large-format, dye-sub shop in Vegas, and that was wonderful. Today, it's amazing, gratifying, and a bit scary how many of our colleagues are adding dye sub. But it's no surprise. Walk any tradeshow floor and you'll see that dye-sub fabric is everywhere, from P-O-P to interior décor. Screen-printed wool felts are no longer featured throughout casinos; it's all dye-sub suede polyester. All-over sublimation prints on assembled garments is the rage - and don't forget, you can make any garment, hat, or sports shoe with traditional cut and sew. We have even printed LEARNING CURVE Dye-sublimation printers went from 44 and 54 inches to 64 inches, in the range we now call narrow goods. The next jump was to 74 and 100 inches. Then there were grand-format dye-sub printers; the first wave printed up to 10 feet wide. Until recently I could count the number of 15-foot dye-sub printers in the US on one hand, but now we have one in our own backyard. With all this competition in dye-sub fabrics, what's an old dye-sub guy to do? Take the 20 years of experience and apply it to sublimating beautiful images to steel and aluminum sheets, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, medium-density fiber board, wood, phenolic, and composite board. Just as with fabrics, there are small, bigger, and biggest printing capabilities based on the size of the production equipment, available sheets, and other substrates. Shops have been using desktop inkjet printers with dispersed dye inks and T-shirt presses for years to print the little, hard substrates such as ceramic tiles, bag tags, coasters, mousepads, magnets, etc. The good news is the latest generation of wide-format inkjet dye-sublimation printers can rival the image quality of the best desktop printers, so all of these small products can be produced at a much faster pace and lower cost. CRAIG MILLER is a principal shareholder in Las Vegasbased Pictographics (pictographics.net), where he is also director of military and law-enforcement projects. 16 dye-sub costumes for many major Vegas productions, amusement-park costumes, and even Broadway shows. http://www.pictographics.net

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