Impressions - June/July 2017 - 48

Small orders are as easy as large ones with
sublimation, and production is a three-step
process: create, print and press.
in each cycle. For example, cellphone
covers measure about 2" x 5".That means
you can set up six of them on an 8.5" x
11" sheet of transfer paper and produce
six units during one print/press cycle. If
a blank costs about $2.50 and ink costs
about 10 cents, plus labor and overhead,
you can turn a nice profit when the
average retail price is about $25. Not
bad, especially when you can produce
six units in three minutes.

On the surface, sublimation resembles
some other digital heat-transfer processes, but what happens below the surface
separates it from all other decoration technologies. The material is dyed through
molecular bonding rather than being
printed on the surface. The result is an
image that is permanently embedded,
which means no scratching, peeling or
cracking.With apparel, it means no fading,
despite repeated launderings.

Sublimation could help
your business break into the
performance apparel market.

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i m p r e s s i o n s m a g . c o m JUNE/JULY 2017

For Screen Printers
To get a better perspective on what adding sublimation to a screen-printing shop
entails, let's look deeper at how the two
technologies compare.
Screen printing is categorized as an
analog-printing process that involves a
delivery system dependent on transmitting
individual colors to a substrate through
some type of manually prepared plate,
stencil, template, screen, etc. Sublimation,
on the other hand, is a digital-printing
process that reproduces computerized
images directly onto a surface via inkjet
or laser printers. The colors are created
on demand and no templates, screens or
plates are required to define images. Instead,
they are produced using tiny ink droplets
placed via electronic coding.
Digital printing is ideal for short runs
and on-demand orders because of the
quick setup. Plus, it has a broader spectrum
of color production and - in the case of
sublimation - can deliver photo-quality
imaging.
Analog printing has long setup and
breakdown times, so it becomes cost
prohibitive in terms of smaller runs. But
for large-volume production, it is cheaper
than digital printing.To better understand
how production compares between screen
printing and sublimation, take a look at
Time and Cost: Screen Printing vs. Sublimation, which features estimates of the time
required to apply an 8" x 10" four-color
image to 24 poly-performance T-shirts.
In terms of setup time, sublimation
easily wins. In terms of production time,
screen printing is much faster on a perpiece basis. However, when the setup and
equipment breakdown times are factored
in, the pendulum swings back to sublimation. This example is for a relatively
small order. In a larger-quantity scenario,
screen-printing production times would
outpace sublimation to the point that it
would make up for the setup and breakdown times, so that the total production
time of screen printing would fall below
that of sublimation.
In terms of sublimation-materials costs,
ink averages just more than a half-penny
per square inch, or less than 7% of the
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Impressions - June/July 2017

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