Main features sublimation inks and pre-treatments for best results

New DuPont™ Artistri® Xite Sublimation Inks for RTR market and DuPont™ Artistri® Brite pre-treatments for DTG market revealed at Fespa 2018.

At Fespa, looking for innovation in the inks sector, we met Mario Castelli, Key Account Manager Digital Inks in DuPont Italy, who explained us the main features sublimation inks and the pre-treatments must have, as DuPont is an innovation leader in digital textile printing since the launch of the Artistri® 2020 printer more than 15 years ago.

Digital printing on textiles in general requires inks with specific characteristics for printability and print quality, among all excellent jettability (i.e. the property of the inks to minimize nozzle outs, misdirects and print head clogging) and batch-to-batch consistency (the property of the ink of maintaining the same quality and color rendering from one production batch to another; thus, customers are ensured of high productivity by avoiding individual attention to single batches) avoiding additional settings at every ink supply.

On this regard, of course, pointed out Castelli, “The inks must be able to offer excellent colour and image sharpness in order to allow printers to meet the requests of even the most demanding brands. In fashion collections, not only the excellence of the colour, but also consistency and repeatability are in fact essential requirements.”

A proper quality product allows end users to have reduced down times, scraps, shorter maintenance cycle times that means higher productivity and less printing costs.

At Fespa DuPont showcased Artistri® Xite S2500 and S3500 dye sublimation inks. These inks offer better jetting, image sharpness, intensity of black inks and colours. Mid viscosity dye sublimation ink Xite S2500 and high viscosity dye sublimation ink Xite S3500 designed for printing on polyester textile substrates gathered a lot of interest from printing professional.

In the Xite Roll To Roll space, with S2500 and S3500 launches, DuPont further expands its broad portfolio to meet customer demands for product quality and deeper colours. Artistri® Xite inks achieve greater colour with improved workflow efficiency and reduced environmental footprint over alternative printing technologies.

Given this background, Mario Castelli described DuPont™ Artistri® inks focusing the attention on the S1500, S2500 and S3500 Series.

Which end customers are the S1500, S2500 and S3500 sublimation inks addressed to?

“To printers working on a market that requires high quality printing on polyester – said Castelli -. The S1500, S2500, S3500 have excellent performances of solidity and sharpness of the image, excellent resistance to UV rays, washing, perspiration thus offering the end user an ink, which also fits perfectly for sports and leisure applications. That’s because DuPont manufacturing standards ensure that we can count on the highest ink performances every time.”

Mario Castelli

What about jettability?

“DuPont has designed and tested the inks for best-in-class jetting – he assured -. The same applies to decapping, i.e. the instantaneous recovery of nozzle jetting after printing inactivity. For the user this means a reduction of cleaning cycles, less ink waste, less downtime and lower maintenance costs.”

Can the printer use the same sublimation paper used with other inks?

“The DuPont Sublimation inks S1500, S2500 and S3500 are designed to work with dye sublimation coated papers and some uncoated papers.”

Of course, if a printer wants to switch to the S1500, S2500, S3500 he will have to re-set its colour profiling, but DuPont has designed these inks in order that the need to re-program the profile when changing inks is minimized. In the end, the main difference an end user will see is a more saturated and neutral black in high coverage areas and a much sharper image.

Related to pre-treatments for DTG Mario Castelli presenting the new products stated: “DuPont™ Artistri® Brite P5003 is a fabric pre-treatment product for application onto dark coloured cotton t-shirts that enable efficient and consistent printing combined with bright, wash resistant colour prints, while Artistri® P5010 is developed for use with white cotton and polyester shirts. P5003 and P5010 offer improved wash fastness, white ink setup productivity and tunnel dry performance.”

Constantly innovating in the field of Direct To Garment printing, the brand showed that they have reached more vibrant colors and superior washing fastness.