Introduction

There's no black art to digital dye-sub - of course, the more you spend, the more you learn about the process and the more proficient you become; the better and more productive your results, but the basic principal is quite simple. With a normal, piezo head inkjet printer for maximum quality (and it could be anything from an £80 A4 desktop to a £10,500 Mimaki wide format machine, to a £200,000+ super wide monster) and special sublimation inks you print your image in reverse onto heat transfer paper. Take this print and apply heat and pressure (using a transfer press) and sublimate the image onto your material. This has to be polyester, or high polyester mix, so it could be a polyester coated ceramic mug, a polyester faced t-shirt, a flag, floor tile or mobile phone case among many, many other possibilities. The heat changes state, allowing it to be released from the paper before it attaches itself to the polyester. It really is that simple.

Essentially, we have the perfect technology for the start-up company, yet one that can evolve with them as they grow - to the extent that we have customers with substantial investment in wide format inkjet printers, that produce thousands of yards of print a week, yet they are using the same basic technology as someone with a small desktop unit!

So; if you've already got a PC with something like CorelDRAW or Photoshop, a desktop printer or even a heatpress you're most of the way there to taking your first steps along the way to digital dye sublimation printing. If you're an embroidery company looking to expand, a sign maker who gets asked for t-shirts and mugs to accompany the signage you do for the local rugby club, or you simply want to be able to offer your customers a bigger range of products, you need to be talking to one of the many companies who can help you make the right choice.

In the next article, we'll look at your shopping list, and beyond that, how to embrace wide format digital printing and ultimately volume production. If you can't wait until then, have a look through the website and you'll see examples of companies well placed to assist you. At Hybrid, we work closely with a small number of specialist resellers, all of whom are pioneers in their field, and will gladly supply everything mentioned above - along with a welcome dollop of experience and encouragement.

Let's Shop

OK - so it's shopping time. In the introduction, we looked at what the concept of digital dye sublimation was all about, so if you're ready to take your first steps, here's where to start.

At the very least, you're going to need a computer, some design software to run on it, a desktop inkjet, some sublimation ink, some paper, a cutting plotter, a heat press, and your substrate of choice.

Chances are you'll already have some kind of computer - any recent PC or Mac will do, but it would be wise to consider purchasing a dedicated machine - you don't want to have your accounts PC tied up when your customer's waiting for their mugs or mousemats, and vice versa. An off-the-shelf Dell PC starts at around £500 ex VAT, and if you're speccing it yourself, put at least 2Gb RAM and a decent hard disk in, and go for the fastest processor available because as you start to crunch bigger files, you'll benefit from the extra power.

CorelDRAW! is the cheapest route into specialist design software but Adobe's Creative Suite (comprising PhotoShop and Illustrator, plus another couple of apps) is a stormer, and gives everything you could ever want, but at a price premium - though it is PC and Mac compatible.

Both these pieces of software will let you produce any conceivable design - from simply editing a digital photo, re-drawing or creating from scratch an award winning logo, or putting together whole montages of beautiful design. But to make any money, it's going to need printing, so the next step is an inkjet printer. Even supermarkets sell desktop inkjet printers these days, so you can pick one up pretty much anywhere, but the big advantage of going to an industry specialist is that they will be able to evaluate your needs far better. It would be worth considering an A3 printer that could cost under £300. It'll be easy to run, takes up no space at all and can produce excellent quality prints. To get your prints to sublimate though, it'll need special ink, rather than standard graphics cartridges.

With myriad options available to you, you can shop around 'til the cows come home, but the cheapest ink will rarely be the best, and it's important to weigh up the costs of wasted ink, paper and substrates, as well as potentially damaged print heads before you plump for the bargain basement solution. Dye sublimation cartridges for the smaller machines from a trusted supplier will fit the bill, and give you the technology to print onto transfer paper with ease. These papers can be sourced in sizes from A4 upwards, and the advantages of using a good quality paper are easy to see - you'll get sharper images, denser colours and terrific transfer yield - saving you money and improving your product quality.

If you're wanting to do some logos, badges or mug wraps, a cutting plotter will automate a large part of the shape cutting process for you. Mimaki's CG-60SR is a top quality 610mm wide machine, which will register marks, cut at a good speed and even die cut your paper for you. If it's garment marking you're doing, the plotter will contour cut the designs, ready to weed off and apply with a heatpress, and with the superb and free FineCut software that's bundled with all the Mimaki cutters, it integrates the whole "Print and Cut" workflow seamlessly - more on this in the next article. Cutting plotters start at around £1,000 and sport some impressive features.

The last part of the process is taking your printed paper and pressing it onto your substrate. For this, you'll need a heat press, and they range from simple A4 size desktop machines at around £350, through easy-to-use swing away presses, to a digitally controlled mid sized machine at around the £850 mark. Obviously quality, features and size govern price, but as a minimum, make sure you've got one big enough to press the designs you envisage doing! Swing-away presses are easier to use than clamshells, and a digital press lets you set both time and temperature to make the transfer process as accurate possible.

The real beauty of dye sublimation is the vast range of substrates that you can print onto, and as you've doubtless seen at exhibitions and in the magazines, you can go into many markets with simply this standard technology; the only requirement is that there is a polyester element to the material you are transferring onto. In the case of a ceramic mug, this would have a polyester coating, t-shirts are now widely available made from cotton feel polyester and mousemats, bar runners, phone covers, computer mice, coasters, bags, baseball hats and the like are all pretty standard fare. It leaves you with a great range of products to offer your customers, so the rugby club or chess league that you supply can have not just one personalised item, but a whole host of products to embellish with their logo, sponsor or names. The only limit is your imagination!

In the next artcile; we'll move up a level, and see what’s available in the wide format arena. In the meantime, have fun shopping...

Wide Format

Within the whole ‘wide format’ inkjet printing market, dye sublimation has seen some of the largest growth in the past few years, so what’s made it so successful and why should you consider moving into it?

In the previous article, we looked at what’s involved in starting up inkjet, or digital dye sublimation, and for those with tighter budgets, the small format option, ie; A4 or A3 size prints, offers a very realistic proposition. With wide format – typically a print width of around 36” and above – the entry costs are higher, but in turn, so are the rewards. All the processes are exactly the same as for small format, but with the extra size and volume necessitated by the output.

Wide format dye sublimation gives you three major advantages over smaller, desktop setups: 1) size – obviously (!), 2) volume of output and 3) speed of print. If you’re creating small format goods, such as mug wraps, mouse mats or promotional products, it’s possible to run hundreds or thousands off when you’re printing onto 1.6m wide, 120m long rolls of paper! Additionally, larger format prints such as apparel and flags are possible, and with speeds on sub £11,000 machines capable of outputting a rugby shirt in seven minutes, genuine volume production is a reality.

Mimaki’s TPC-1000 makes for an excellent entry level machine and shares speed, quality and features with other Mimaki's that whilst larger, cost almost twice the price. At 1m wide and including an inegrated cutting plotter, it allows customers to easily make the leap to higher volume production, and at the same time, reduces the manual intervention required when using smaller kit.

Such a machine keeps start up costs low, lets companies install multiple machines and instantly adds profit margin at the start of the investment. As you might expect, running costs on the wide format machines are proportionally much lower than smaller, desktop machines, with ink and paper costs benefiting from shipping in big cartridges or vast rolls! Whilst the principals remain the same, the software you will need tends to be more specialist and benefit can be gained from using dedicated textile RIP software for some applications. The TPC-1000 includes Mimaki's very well regarded RasterLink Pro RIP package, which features all the necessary elements (tiling, image mirroring, dye sub profiles and more) for this market.

So what’s brought the big growth, other than the reduction in machine pricing from some of the major manufacturers? Just like in small format, it’s been the adoption of the technology by such a vast range of applications. As an example, England’s historic success at the Rugby World Cup in 2003 spawned a huge boom in not just how rugby shirts are produced, but the actual design of the garment as well, with multi-colour sponsors logos easily reproduced onto tight fitting polyester-lycra shirts.

Equally, it can be said that expectations and demands of buyers has altered too, with less call for substantial runs of similar products, and an ever increasing desire to personalise, promote and offer unique or short run products, or reduce the lifetime of goods by offering updated replacements sooner. Subsequently, this driving of the market by the buyers has meant that hardware companies have had to respond to their customers, because if you're getting asked to produce it, it's up to us machine manufacturers to provide you with the kit to do it on!