Difference between sublimation and digital printing

Sublimation Printing Vs. Digital printing: What’s the actual Difference?

With technological advancement, the ability to transfer the digital images onto wide variety of materials is also increasing day by day. Sublimation and Digital Printing both are quite demanded ways of printing your photos. But both the processes have their own advantages and disadvantages. For a better clarity it is important to understand the difference between both the processes.

Sublimation Printing: Sublimation process is a quite popular one. It is a dye printing technique which gives you an allowance to print over all using a lot of colours without any boundation. This process is being experienced on lightweight fabric. Sublimation process is being done with lot of care on special transfer paper using specialty ink. The artwork created with the initial process is then finally moved onto the garment with the help of heat and pressure. Sublimation is the best when your requirements are of full colours or complex artwork. Lets now further look into the pros and cons of Sublimation Process:

The Pros: 1. Lot of colour option without any cost 2. The dye of sublimation never faces the problem of cracking, fading or peeling.

3. Sublimation has its speciality in creating overall, seam to seam designs on both the front and the back too.

4. Printing done with sublimation is at its best, where you will not even get to feel the print on the garment.

5. It is appropriate for the small quantity requirements.

The Cons: 1. It does not work on all the garments and works better on specifically polyester or poly bend 2. Going for PMS colour match in sublimation is not possible.

3. The sublimation printing should be done only on light coloured garments which stop you from using dark colour garments.

4. The finishing of the printing near the edges, collars and the seams is not proper and perfect.

Digital Printing: Digital Printing is a method of printing the image based on digital which is being imposed to various media. Digital Printing has got much popularity since past few years. Lets now look into the advantages and disadvantages of Digital Printing:

The Pros: 1. Digital Printing is extremely fast and helps in fulfilling all your tight deadlines.

2. It is very flexible and gives you the allowance of changing the printed material whenever its needed.

3. If your quantity is less than 1000, then digital printing proves to be beneficial as it is cost effective when compared to the traditional method of printing.

4. Digital printing gives the exact outcome of what you wish to get printed. The creation of digital printing will exactly be the same of what you expect out of it.

The Cons: 1. The colour match quality is not satisfactory in the case of Digital Printing. It uses four colour process whereas traditional method preferred to use PMS and inks to deliver accuracy in the colours.

2. Digital Printing does not have a lot of material options to offer when compared to traditional method.

3. The inks of Digital Printing are not fully absorbed by the paper which leads to appearance of the cracks in the color all around the edges.

4. It comes out to be expensive in the case of more quantity of print runs. Requirement of more than 2500 pieces turns out to be highly expensive.