Fabric printinggoes high-tech with the help of a computercontrolled nvironmentfriendly technique
JAPANESE followers of fashion can now
buy the latest thing in sartorial elegance:
fabrics printed with the same technology used by millions of computer
printers worldwide. Canon, the electronics company and Kanebo, the clothing company, have developed the
bubble jet textile printing system, which
the companies say can be faster and
more cost effective than traditional
methods of fabric printing.
Bubble jet printers use an array of
ink nozzles, each of which is about
half the diametre of a human hair. The
nozzles are heated and this causes the
ink to form a bubble, which expands
and shoots out of the end of the nozzle
6,000 times a second. Canon and
Kanebo formed a technical alliance in
1990 to develop a bubble jet textile
printer. This printer is a large machine
which weighs 7,000 kg and stands 1.7m
high. The printer has 16 print-
heads, arranged in two groups to
permit two-way printing. The
printheads house an array of 1,360
nozzles, which are fed by up to
eight ink stations. The machine
has a print speed of 1 metre(m) a
minute and can print fabric up to @3
1.65m wide. Each textile printer A
costs about us $1 million.
The system can be used with a
variety of materials, including
cotton, silk, nylon, polyester and
leather. Kanebo is marketing 4
bubble-jet printed scarves and ties,
and there are also plans to develop
suits, shirts, bags and sportswear 40
using the technology. A Japanese
designer has produced leather 7
coats printed by the bubble jet
system. The new system offers
a number of advantages over
traditional print systems: it offers higher
quality than rotary screen printing and
is faster than flat screen printing. The
system is ideal for small production
runs.
Producing a fabric, from design to
sample printing, can take up to six
weeks using the screen printing process,
but the bubble jet system can cut this to
three days. Designs can be created on a
PC or fed in via a scanner or CD-ROM,
edited, manipulated (the system offers
more than 16 colours), and then
printed. Bubble jet printing is also more
environment-friendly because there is
no waste water or ink.
Although the system is cheaper
than traditional systems in short
runs of up to 50 in of fabric, it is
more expensive but compansates
is when used for mass production.
;I However, despite the success of its
bubble jet printers, Cation is keen
to use it in other areas, including
CD labelling, the textile industry
and consumer electronics pro
ducts. One idea is to build TV Sets
with built-in bubble jet devices for
printing information pulled from
the Internet.
Canon launched the first
bubble jet printer in 1981, and the
company estimates that printers
using bubble jet or similar technologies accounted for more than
70 per cent of the 42 million
computer printers sold worldwide
in 1996.
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