Digital textile printing is one of the fastest developing sectors in the industry. And, why not! It has definitely made the task of printing on fabric much easier as compared to the traditional form of textile printing. Digital textile printing is the process of printing designs on pre-treated fabric straight from a modified ink-jet printer.

The industry which stood at a value of US $ 7.5 billion world-wide in 2015 has revolutionized the mode of fabric printing. It has opened the floodgates of new opportunities to designers and traders in the textile printing industry. The applications are tremendous; flags, soft signage, soft furnishing and apparel industry are just to name a few of them. The type of inks used for the ink-jet printers are also varied. Some of them are developed anew while some have been modified from the analogue printing process.

Different type of fabric requires different kinds of inks. Some of the most commonly used dyes in the industry are Acid Dyes Inks, Disperse Inks or Dye Sublimation and Reactive Inks. Fabric such as silk, wool, albumen fiber and polyamide textile require Acid Dye Inks whereas Reactive Dye Inks are suited for cotton, silk, wool and chemical fiber. Disperse Dye Inks are slightly different from the other two in the sense that they produce reproducible and glitzy colors on the polyester fabric on which they are used.

Acid dyes require a specific washing process to be adopted post the printing process. Almost all the acid dyes used nowadays such as Acid Black, Acid Yellow and Acid Red etc are all eco-friendly and do not contain any of the prohibited Amines. Both the acid dyes and the disperse inks work best on the piezo print heads. The pigment dispersions are very popular as the post process needs lesser heat and pressure compared to the other processes using Acid Dyes and Reactive Inks. Direct Dyes Sublimation is considered to be outwardly efficient; however, more finesse is obtained through the transfer method.

With textile printing going high-tech through the digital mode, the buyers and sellers of today are not restricted by the geographical barriers. The customer can exercise control over his design and keep an eye on the process of printing from remote locations. The storage media being computer files, it has become pretty simple to transfer them to any place in the world. This has shortened the time in the entire printing process and also made it highly cost-effective.

Digital textile printing is most suitable when the order size is small. In fact, this type of printing was developed so that small quantities of garments could be printed without having to bear the high cost of setting up several screens for printing a couple of shirts.

The dyes used in the digital textile printing process typically do not alter the textile feel. Some of the inks are usable on leather though it does not fall into the category of textiles. Leather dyes have gained importance due to its increasing use in the apparel or garment industry. All in all, the dyes used in digital textile printing serve greater purpose than those used in the analogue printing.