Fabric Colourful Impression
New revolution for fabrics: Colourful impressions from a printer’s palette
WHEN Tootal Fabrics, the British garment manufacturer based in Manchester, sends a shirting design to Japan or London, it must be confident that the image that emerges from the printer hundreds or thousands of kilometres away will be identical to the one delivered by the printer in its own design office.
The Du Pont 4CAST printer, developed by Dai Nippon Printing, has been on sale outside Japan since 1988. Most of the machines have gone to advertising agencies, magazine art directors and printers, who relish the chance to see, in just a few minutes, what their colour artwork will look like before going to press. It takes 5 minutes to print an image at A4 size, and about 7 minutes for an A3 picture.
The printer has been slow to catch on in the textile market, partly because of its high cost, and partly because, until recently, it used only high-gloss paper, which suits the graphics garment designers of ‘glossy’ brochures. Glossy images are fine for men’s shirtings, but they do not reproduce woollens or upholstery fabrics well. Du Pont is now introducing a matt finish paper that will more closely match a large variety of textiles. But no paper will ever be able to give a realistic represen tation of the surface texture of a nubbly jumper, or of a corduroy.
The printer that Tootal has chosen to do the job uses dye sublimation, in which a hot printing head transfers impressions through a dye ribbon onto paper. The head has 3584 separate heating elements, each of which can be warmed to any one of 256 arbitrary levels. The heat causes dye in the ribbon to sublimate, or turn into gas. This enables the dye to react with the coating on the paper to create an image; the hotter an element, the more dye that is transferred into the coating. The ribbon has four different segments - yellow, magenta, cyan and black - each the size of the image to be printed. Four impressions in yellow, magenta, cyan and black are built up in sequence to produce an image. Overall, the printer has a palette of 16.7 million colours and shades.
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