The Basic Know-How of Sublimation Printing

In the printing industry, we can surely see that we have gone a long way since the early days of transferring designs on different materials; hence we are now in the age of digital printing. We can see how much digital printing is improving, evolving and being more diversified.

From industries which offers screen printing before, digital printing is being offered nowadays, which enables full print designs being on the surface of the desired medium itself. Sublimation printing is becoming the trend nowadays in the industry. Sublimation printing is an offshoot of digital printing that deals with polyester and substance which are coated with polymer. Basically the process utilizes heat and pressure which is applied to a solid surface, turning it into gas, without turning into liquid form.

Simply put, sublimation printing uses sublimation inks to be applied on the surface you want, and then uses a heat press to transfer the design. When the ink turns in to gas, it will be able to penetrate the surface and thus being imprinted permanently on it, resulting to having colorful, detailed designs that is long lasting and resistant to damages like scratching, which is a plus, compared to other printing methods in which the design just sits on top of the surface.

So basically this printing process is very much profitable if you are in the printing industry. Why you ask? It’s simply that there are many profitable items which you can sublimate. Materials which are man-made such polyester fabrics, certain plastics, and nylon can be used. So your range of consumable items is wide and varied. It can be for apparels especially sportswear, and things like mousepads, cellphone cases, tumblers, frames made from plastics or glass, and other types of drinkwares, plates, also sublimation can also be used for signage, name it, it can be utilized for a variety of purposes, granted that for surfaces which has no traction, you use specialty papers known as sublimation transfer papers, which can hold up the inks. Images printed and done in the sublimation way would not chip or even peel. But you should take in consideration that you cannot use this process for surface which are too porous and absorbent, for example cotton; because the ink will just seep through the material and will lead to the colors “bleeding” in to one another.

In the long run, though some may say that this process has some setbacks because there are materials which you cannot print on to, and the fumes that are released from the ink during the heating process can be quite hazardous.

However, we should also take into consideration that this process is also cost efficient for those in the printing industry. Let’s say you would need to print on mugs, for estimation let’s put it that a mug is priced at 30 PHP each, and a set of sublimation ink with 4 colors would be priced 950 PHP, so to produce 10 mugs with sublimation printing, you would spend the following estimation for the materials; 30 PHP for each mug, 4 PHP for each ink usage per print, 1 PHP for each sublimation paper used, 2 PHP per mug, in electricity consumption. So for each mug you would spend 37 PHP, so that’s 370 PHP for a set of 10 printed mugs. And you can sell each mug for 70-150 pesos per piece, depending on the design. Say, you would sell a mug for 150 PHP; then you would get a profit of 113 PHP apiece; which is cost efficient because the set of inks can be used for other projects in the longs run. And this estimation excludes which heat press you will use, because most probably, if you are already in this type of business chances are you already have different types of heat presses, and if not, a good set of mug press or a multipurpose 3D Sublimation Machine, or a 6-in-1 Heat Press Machine will be a good investment if you are considering building a serious career in this field.

To summarize, this quick and useful method can surpass the printing methods of the past, which leads to shorter production time, and is very efficient for products which needs multiple colors, and photo-realistic images, the results in the end are permanent, which makes the output products durable and can be used in the long-run.