Discuss the various aspects of heat press technology. Transfer paper, inks, plastisol transfers, vinyl cutters, printers, commercial usage, durability, suppliers, etc.
Finally got around to working with imprintables opaque printable material and after several hours of tweaking the printer profiles I finally got some really nice prints. The eagle one is something I printed on one my own personal t-shirts.
A large image like this one does give somewhat of a heavy feel, the material is so thin it's not really that bad. The image was taken into corel paint and the outer edge was feathered slightly. Contour cutting into a image with Black doesn't seem to work the best (yet, more testing needed). Contour cutting don't seem to bother on other colors.
Anyway, I thinks its great material and see a lot of potential business with it.
Great print Mike. What printer did you use and what tweaking did you have to make to get that aswesome print? I have a pack of opaque but have not started testing.
I just finished off my sample roll of this material as well. Sadly, I ended up using most of the material as just a white for two clients, the final chunk ended up being printed on. I used mine on a Roland SP300V, so print and cut where done by the same machine. The colors didn't come out as I had expected they would, but much like Mike, it was profile problems. The customer I did printed logos for had some lighter colored shirts done with our Brother DTG, which wants you to develope in RGB, and then does its own internal RIP. When I opened it in Versaworks it came out purple instead of blue, since it was a sample roll, I sent it on through anyway to see how it'd come out. Came out purple, but the client still liked it, so I gave him a discount since it was made on a sample roll and the color wasn't the same. Got the image to look more blue'ish for him and ordered an 11 yard roll. The material's a bit spendy, but the hand is good, especially for company logos and names. I had to adjust my cut depth to be about double of its normal cutting power, but didn't have any real issues weeding.
This was done on the roland sp300 printer/cutter. There are color profiles that the rip program uses to send the files to the printer. To get the file to print properly (the way I want it to anyway), you have to play around with different software settings and it's a lot of trial and error sometimes. This particular material I had issues with getting the color Black to look good but the time it took paid off, I was very pleased on how the material prints and applies. My next test is to apply it to some different types of material, primarily nylon.
Here is a picture of a 100% nylon jacket I did a couple of hours ago using imprintables eco-film plus. The jacket looks a bit wrinkled as I just took it out of the washer. The vinyl looks and feels just like a screen print image. They make some pretty nice print & cut vinyl.
Ive not used the imprintables stuff yet (Im suppost to be having samples on the way for the last 5 weeks but never recieved) pouts.. ..but have used the newest colorprint. Just did a job of some shirts last week..
what profile are you guys using??
I used the one for the roland thermal material.. and colors came out right on.. including the blues and the blacks..with no tweaking whatsoeverl.
Ive not used the imprintables stuff yet (Im suppost to be having samples on the way for the last 5 weeks but never recieved) pouts.. ..but have used the newest colorprint. Just did a job of some shirts last week..
what profile are you guys using??
I used the one for the roland thermal material.. and colors came out right on.. including the blues and the blacks..with no tweaking whatsoeverl.
That's the same profile I started with and just re-adjusted the settings until I got it to look the way I wanted it to.
I just used the generic vinyl profile. After the image came out purple, I put some Oracal in and used the same profile, and it came out purple as well. It was more a RGB to CMYK issue than anything.
Just curious, did you print and text or graphics with pure black and then cut it out? I tried some black text and then countor cut and it looked terrible as seen in the picture. As long as I leave a border around it, or feather out the edges like I did i the eagle picture, it cuts fine, but pure black, well, the picture tells the story, the vinyl just bubbles up.
Unfortunately, it was just a purple that was supposed to be blue heh. It might be too much ink saturating though. I've had problems with decals that were heavy in black lifting and curling (the vinyl was actually shrinking from saturation). Perhaps it's just an adjustment to the amount of black ink to use, or just waiting for it to dry before cutting it. Also, I turned my plotter's heater off when printing and cutting this material, may be another reason I had no problem.
It might be too much ink saturating though. I've had problems with decals that were heavy in black lifting and curling (the vinyl was actually shrinking from saturation). Perhaps it's just an adjustment to the amount of black ink to use, or just waiting for it to dry before cutting it. Also, I turned my plotter's heater off when printing and cutting this material, may be another reason I had no problem.
That is the problem from what I figured out, to much black ink, but if I adjust the profile to eliminate the vinyl curling, then the black is no longer black, it looks more like a dark grey. I'm going to try a sample, letting the ink dry and then cut and see what happens. I always turn the heaters off also when printing on this type of material.
Imprintables Opaque Vinyl Sample 
