Why is digital printing not good on dark colored t-shirts?
Digital printing is a relatively new printing process that is great for printing small quantities without a lot of set-up and cost. It is also very good at printing photographs and other four color process style designs. What it isn’t good for is printing lighter colored inks on dark colored shirts. The reason for this is the weakness of the inks and the inability to underbase the design properly.
The digital printing machines look like beefed up inkjets. The inks are thicker and created specifically to bond to fabric and not paper. They just aren’t thick enough to not allow the darker color of the shirts to show through and change the look of the print color. The digital printing machines do have settings to print a white underlay of the design called an underbase.
Underbasing the design is very similar to the same process with screen printing, just not as effective. In theory the underbase should solve the problem by creating a white canvas to print the design on top but it also comes with its own problems. Many times you can get misalignment causing the white to show out from under the main design.
All in all the digital printing has a way to go but it is more miss than hit at this stage of the technology.
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