ankit

Two questions:

1. How far can the print head be from the item we're printing on? Any idea how many inches we can be away from the shirt before we see quality drop?

2. Out of curiosity, we always print onto a surface that lies horizontally, what if it was vertical? Put the issue aside of the tshirt hanging, I'll stretch it a little and make it a flat surface for printing. Will it print vertically?

 

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sunnydayz

The printer only prints horizontally, not veritically. The distance is more like mm's and not inches.. Usually my printhead is around 1/8 to 3/16 of in inch from my printhead. As you start getting further away from the printhead you will get ghosting, or overspray around the edges of your image.

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ankit

Thanks for the fast response - why does it only support horizontal printing? Added force from overcoming gravity or something?

 

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sunnydayz

Because the printhead only moves horizontally And the substrate needs to be fairly close to the printhead for details.

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ankit

Haha, you're right. My thought, which I didn't say, was if you actually rotated the printer 90 degrees, so horizontal movement becomes vertical. Any reason that wouldn't work? Maybe the ink would "fall" while trying to hit the shirt because gravity pulls it down?

 

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sunnydayz

Hmmm I dont know haha. It sprays out so its possible it would work. You will have to let me know if you try it I would think the bigger problem would be with the capping station as the ink would run out of it once the printhead comes off the dock.

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DAGuide

I am not saying the concept is impossible (i.e. M&R is trying to release a direct-to-screen printer that does this - not this is not the iDot, this one actual prints on screen printing screens!), but the print head was not designed to do this. Epson built the print heads to their specs taking into account their viscocity of inks. We have already broken Epson's original concept for the print head when we added thicker inks (i.e. dtg, dye sub,...) into the printer. This by itself has caused enough problems with clogging. By rotating the printer 90 degrees forward and having the print head spit ink out horizontal, you would need the force of the print head firing the heavier ink out across a safe distance not to allow the print head to touch the surface. At some point, the effects of gravity will kick in and force the ink to start to drop as well (i.e. think about a sprinkler system and how the water is projected up to extend the reach. There are a lot of people that have doubts about the M&R dts printer and how effective it will work and that is using the lighter dye or pigment based inks.

The concept is a good one because then the overall footprint of the printer would be smaller and you could almost hang your shirt up to get it to print. But I would also imagine that the amount of white ink we lay down on dark garments would start to run as well.

Just my thoughts (don't let me stop you from trying and reporting your results),

Mark

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