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.

Range Of Label Printing Machines to Fulfill Commercial Requirements

What do you do when you buy certain things from the market? The first thing we do is observing the products and labels for specific information. Labels are one of the used to be part of any product these days. These labels offer all essential information about the products. It is mandatory for almost all products to have labels offering certain essential information. Accordingly, a wide variety of labels are seen in the market. Hence, the demand and supply principle of the market has led to emergence of a wide variety of label printing machines. It is interesting to review the types of label printing machines available today. This article gives a quick review of a variety of label printing machines.

The necessity of type of label for different products varies significantly and it also depends on the information to be displayed on it. For example, food products need labels with manufacturing date, best use before time span, price etc. It also needs branding labels showing awesome product pictures, brand name etc. Some products need bar codes for product identification and tracking inventory. Some products need labels showing warnings, instructions of how to use etc. Thus, label printing requirements vary as per label information and products. Obviously, technology has provided a plenty of label printing devices fulfilling every specific label printing requirement. Just ask for a specific requirement and you will get printing machines designed for specific requirements.

Though, there is a huge variety of label printing machines, there are three main printing technologies used in these machines. These technologies are –

• Flexographic printing technology is a traditional technique of printing.
• Direct thermal printing implies use of heat for printing with heat sensitive media.
• Thermal transfer printing where heat melts the ribbon ink which is absorbed on the printing media.

The label printing machines implement one of these technologies which suit the best for the application. Let’s see the types of label printing machines available on the market. You will find a splendid variety of label printing machines like –

• Barcode printers, name tags, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, price tag printers. These printing machines mainly implement direct thermal printing technique.
• A wide variety of inkjet and laser label printing machines have been developed to fulfill the market requirements. You will find black or 4 color and multicolor label printers developed for desktop as well as industrial applications.

Besides these printers, there are ticket printers which print specific size tickets on a continuous stationary with perforation (sequential manner), wrist band printers and printers designed to print on a wide variety of media/ base such as plastic, glass, wood, cloth etc. The evolution of variety of digital label printing machines also helped develop a variety of superior quality printing inks suitable for printing devices and applications. So, if you are looking for label printing machine, just determine your printing requirements and you will get the best suitable label printing machine at affordable price.