Discuss the various aspects of direct to garment printing. DTG printers include Brother, T-Jet, Flexi-Jet, DTG Kiosk, Kornit, Mimaki, Tex-Jet and others! Discuss and learn about this up and coming printing technology.
So I have heard a few people do this, but wanted to see if anyone on here has.
Basically in order to combat having to print a white underbase on dark shirts, they use a laser etching system to burn the color out of the pigmets and turn them an off white. They then print the design normally.
So I have heard a few people do this, but wanted to see if anyone on here has.
Basically in order to combat having to print a white underbase on dark shirts, they use a laser etching system to burn the color out of the pigmets and turn them an off white. They then print the design normally.
Does anyone on here do that?
thats a new one! never heard of that before, do you have any links ? how are they doing the registration ? very interesting.
Unless they get a combo machine Laser/dtg printer (which I have never heard of) how are they going to move the shirt from the laser to the dtg printer and get the prints aligned? An interesting thought though. I would expect that you would have to use very low power , as in a watermark setting, on the laser or you would damage the fabric. As far as cost it would be much less that using white ink after the initial output for the laser. I have two lasers and they are $11,000 - $15,000 each. You can find them cheaper but i don't think I would go cheaper than that for a commercial application. You can also find them much much more expensive.
Brian
Last edited by Brian-R; March 18th, 2009 at 04:35 PM.
Reason: Adding info
After reading this post I had my staff try laser etching a black T-shirt with our Seit Laser Bridge and then printing a CMYK only design on top of it using a Kornit Digital Printer. The results were not good ont he first attempt so we discontinued the experiment. In my opinion, even if it did work, the amount of time, effort and cost to develop methods to go from one piece of equipment to the next with exact placement didn't make sense.
.. In my opinion, even if it did work, the amount of time, effort and cost to develop methods to go from one piece of equipment to the next with exact placement didn't make sense.
Thanks Rob, and I agree with the above statement. We have a Laserpro Explorer and you can use that to decorate on shirts but it would only be advisable on some designs with small area coverage similar to these pics:
Lasering on dark shirts 
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