giniweslowski

I am doing t-shirts hot pink 100% cotton with an all-black design. The black is coming out faded, unless I do 2 passes. I tried using a 50/50 pretreatment and the print came out great, very nice black. Is there any reason I shouldnt use pretreatment? I was told pretreatment was only for white ink. Can it be used without white ink?

 

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sunnydayz

The only problem with using the regular pretreatment on a light shirt, is that it can stain. Usually its not really noticable until its been in the sun for awhile. They do have a pretreatment that can be used though for light color garments, called fast color, which works really well. It can be found at equipment zone. Hope this helps

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tfalk

I would think that the time required to pretreat a shirt would be more than the time required to do 2 color passes on each shirt...

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Don-ColDesi

The reason for the extra "pop" when using the pre-treatment is that it tends to keep the inks "up" in the shirt and not sinking in as much. The longterm washability may be compromised a bit however, as no extensive testing has been done on this. Secondly, the typical amount of pre-treatment on a garment equates to about 25 cents or so (half that if doing 50/50 dilution) and takes time, so the trade off is not just about time its about the cost of the pre-treatment as opposed to the cost of a second pass. You may want to do some testing when using either method as a double pass will likely require a longer curing time as you are using twice as much ink.

Hope this helps!

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nebuladude

Without having Chemist input, I'd say printing cmyk directly on pretreat is a bad idea. Washability would most likely suffer greatly as these inks weren't designed to stick to pretreat. White ink was design to work with pretreat, cmyk was design to stick to cotton or white ink. That's my take on the issue.

 

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