Digital Textile Printing Technology - New Horizon For Textile Industry

Digital technology is the keyword of this era. Every industry and field has changed with digital technology revolution. Textile industry has also rewarded by digital technology and most of the processes in textile industry have become fast and easy. Textile printing is one of the processes which have changed drastically. The traditional rotary screen printing has now replaced by various innovative technologies. It is interesting to see how digital technology has brought magical change in textile printing. This article talks about the latest digital printing technology and its advantages.

Advantages Of Digital Printing Technology

Earlier, textile printing was carried out with rotary screen printing. This technique was replaced by many other techniques like thermal transfer printing, thermal inkjet, continuous inkjet, piezoelectric inkjet, electrophotography etc. Digital printing technology brought a variety of digital printers to print on papers. Similarly, digital textile printing technology helped print on fabrics. For digital textile printing, it is essential that the fabric must be processed to have an ink holding capability. Digital printing technology has offered many advantages over traditional printing such as –

• Easy and fast process and printing
• Great flexibility for printing
• Availability of more colors and superb quality printing with photo/ realistic effects
• Facility for exclusive / unlimited designs

But these advantages are common advantages of digital printing arena. It offered wonderful benefits to textile industry as well. These advantages are –

• Economical printing – Digital textile printing saved time, increased printing speed and it is cost- effective.
• Accelerated designing and printing – It not only reduced the space requirements for storing plates, screens, films etc. but also saved time for proofing. It helped accelerate design and product development.
• Green technology – It is safe, clean and very less hazardous for environment. It also helps minimize wastage.
• Easy to correct/modify – Unlike traditional techniques, digital textile printing allows to correct or modify designs without delays or increase in costs.
• Facility for short productions to test market trends – With traditional printing, it was difficult to go for short productions because of cost concerns as well as time factor. Digital printing allows printing short productions quickly and in a cost effective way. Thus, it is easy to test new designs and market trends.
• New opportunities – Digital technology has opened new opportunities for designers, sales persons and merchandisers to produce a huge variety of print designs to fulfill market demands and this helped grow textile industry.
• Encouraged fashion era – The ease of textile printing, corrections, short products and reduced delays certainly helped textile industry to serve ever changing demands from fashion industry.

As the digital textile printing machine prints the file stored on computer, it has minimized the risk of design theft. The variety of digital textile printing machines has been developed on the market today. These machines need different types of inks for printing. Usually, disperse dye inks, acid dye inks and reactive dye inks are used for digital textile printing. No doubt, digital technology has brought a miraculous change in textile printing.