Printing onto flag material

[Gary Birch]

John
I have some Hexis Flag on Liner here. Wasn’t happy with the results at all. The colours look very washed out, so much so that I won’t sell it to customers. If you find a way to give satisfactory results please share as I would be interested to know how.

Cheers

Gary

[Ian Hatfield]

Printing solvent on to flag produces a very washed out image and if you double strike it the colour bleed can be nasty on the dark colours. We now only dyesub onto textiles or UV if its over 3m high

[Chris J Giles]

Agreed, never had much success either, solvent on flag does give very flat colours. UV printers onto flag print nice but once the flag starts flapping around the ink can literally ‘shake’ off or at least show really bad crease marks.

I’d always get materials like that printed by a dye-sub place. Dye sub is worlds apart in terms of colour depth and vibrancy plus can be machine washed and re-used. Looks a million dollars, just a pity that you can’t charge that much.

Look to pay anything from £15 to £30 per square metre for quality trade dye-sub printing, plus finishing – which usually involves a lot of stitching.

[Byron Villegas]

Plus one on the wide format sublimation option. That is really the way to go for flags. I remember seeing a post here on a converted Roland with an integrated heat fixing unit. If I remember correctly, that printer could even print directly on (treated?) polyester fabrics. An option for solvent printers is to use 3P Inkjet Textile’s Tru-color Flag. But the colors you’ll get are a bit washed out and I’m not sure if the customer will really like the texture of that fabric.