Printing refers to the formation of a pattern on the surface of fabric using a dye or paint. Since the development of printing technology, various printing processes such as screen printing, rotary screen printing, roller printing, and digital printing have been formed.

These years, digital printing has developed rapidly with its advantages of bright colors, exquisite patterns, high color fastness, soft hand feeling, environmental protection, and low order quantity. It has become the first printing process for high-end custom tea towels.

1. Digital printing materials more types

The traditional printing water-based ink printing cannot achieve a good printing effect on some materials, for which only a large amount of solvent-based ink has to be used for printing;

Digital printing can be ink jet printed on any material using water-based inks and performs well on cotton, linen, silk, wool and other materials.

Digital printing is divided into five categories: active digital printing, acid digital printing, paint digital printing, dispersion thermal transfer printing and distributed direct injection digital printing. Active digital printing is mainly used for digital printing of cotton, hemp, viscose and silk fabrics. It can be applied to digital printing of natural fabrics such as cotton fabrics, silk fabrics and wool fabrics. Acid digital printing is suitable for fabrics such as wool, silk, and other protein fibers and nylon fibers. Digital printing of coatings is suitable for digital ink-jet coating printing of cotton fabrics, silk fabrics, chemical fibers, and blended fabrics, knitted fabrics, sweaters, towels and blankets. Thermal transfer of digital printing is suitable for transfer printing of polyester, non-woven fabrics, ceramics, and other materials. Direct-spraying and dispersing digital printing is suitable for polyester fabrics, such as decorative fabrics, banner cloths, banners, and other digital printing.

The active digital printing process used by Blanc-Tea Towel is ideal for making high-quality custom made by 100% cotton tea towels.

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2. The color of digital printing is more vivid

The fineness of color and pattern is the biggest advantages of digital printing. Digital printing ink is divided into dye-based ink and pigment-based ink. The dyes are brightly colored and are nanometer-scale. In theory, it can be reached 16.7 million colors.

The color of the traditional screen printing is based on the principle of four-color dot contrast, relying on the control of pre-press ink color, the color vividness and display power are not as good as digital printing.

3. Digital prints are more elaborate

The degree of fineness of the digital print is related to the characteristics of the ink-jet print head and the printing speed. The smaller the ink droplets of the ink-jet printhead are, the higher the printing accuracy is.

Conventional printing requires negative film making firstly, and the errors in the plate making the process and the mesh number of the screen influence the fineness of the pattern. In theory, the smaller the aperture of the screen is, the better, but the traditional printing is more using 100~150 mesh screens. The number of meshes of four-color dots is 200 mesh. The higher the mesh number is, the higher the probability of blocking the water-based ink is.

In addition, conventional printing exists limitation instability. The accuracy of printing on the printing plate exerts a tremendous influence on the fine pattern.

4. Digital printing has higher colorfastness

Active digital printing uses reactive dye ink. The dye color separation contains a gene that can chemically react with the fiber. When dying, the dye reacts with the fiber to form a covalent bond between the two, which becomes a whole, improves the washing and rubbing fastness and the color fastness.

5. Digital printing feels softer

In the ink formulation used in the conventional printing process, the resin content as a binder is high, and the amount of ink is relatively large, resulting in a strong coating feeling.

The active digital printing has no coating feeling, the printing is light, soft, and has good back tack.  It would not affect the original fabric feel.

Cotton Kids Hooded Towel

6. Digital printing is more environmentally friendly

In order to solve the problem of poor printing on some materials, the traditional printing process has to use a large number of non-environmentally friendly solvent-based inks for printing, which will cause certain environmental damage;

The active digital printing technology uses nano-grade reactive dye ink, which is suitable for various materials such as cotton, hemp, silk, wool, etc., avoiding the use of non-environmental friendly solvents, and the process of production is more environmentally friendly.

7. Digital printing accepts smaller orders

The process of active digital printing is more efficient, and Blanc-Tea Towel offers customized active digital printing services, and the minimum order quantity of digital printing tea towels is 50.

8. The capacity of digital printing  is more stable

The printing size of traditional printing has limitations, it is impossible to produce a wide and wide product, and the  capacity is low and unstable;

The ink-jet width of digital printing of large industrial digital ink-jet printers can be up to 3 to 4 meters, this kind of printers can print uninterruptedly, length unlimited, they can be even formed a whole production line with stable production capacity, and it can guarantee timely delivery cycle.

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