FAQ - The evolution and use of Digital and Wide Format Printing
The evolution and use of Digital and Wide Format Printing
Driven largely by the photography industry, Digital Printing began in 1991 with difficult to operate and costly inkjet printers using water-soluble cyan, magenta, yellow and black dye-based inks that had poor light stability. Since then, the industry has seen rapid progress in the development of far lower cost, faster and easier to operate printers for a widespread and varied industry use.
Central to this evolution has been the dual concerns of image permanence and quality. An increasingly competitive inkjet industry has driven the development of more stable dye-based inks and ink-specific optimised inkjet media. And more recently, thermal head printers using high-stability, multi-colourant pigmented ink systems from Epson, Hewlett-Packard, and Canon have come to dominate the field.
Further research with a broad range of dye-based and pigmented inks, printed on various types of media, has shown that a fundamental difference between the two types of inks is that the light stability of dye-based inks is much more influenced by the type of media, or ink receptive surface, than are pigmented inks. This has come to be recognized as a major advantage of pigmented inks-they can be printed on many and varied mediums, which is something that is not always possible or economically viable with screen-printing, litho-printing, and other reproduction technologies.
At Specialty Balloons, we’ve embraced the advances in Digital Printing and use it for custom printing of business cards, stationery, leaflets and T-shirt printing, as it’s extremely cost-effective and well suited for short-run work of this nature.
Wide Format Printing, which is a branch of Digital Printing, is used to produce point-of-sale and display banners, posters, and general signage; in most cases Wide Format Printing is more economical than other short-run methods such as screen-printing.
Within this format, there are several different water-based inks and dyes of which some require pre-printing treatment of the materials for adherence and post-printing treatment to ensure water-proofing and light stability.
At Specialty Balloons, we use a “solvent” Wide Format printer, which simply means the ink used is not water-based. “Solvents” have the advantage of being able to be printed directly on uncoated vinyl and other media, as well as ridged substrates such as Foam Board and PVC; the finished prints are waterproof with excellent light stability.
