TransJet from Cham Paper Group
Cham Paper Group is the world's leading manufacturer of coated industrial papers. The Swiss company, founded in 1657, has three factories, one in Switzerland (Cham) and two in Italy (Carmignano and Condino) and a worldwide sales network. TransJet is also considered a market leader because it is a product line that has been on the market practically since the early days of digital sublimation printing. Each year it gains more experience and improves its products based on customer insights as well. It offers the following product portfolio.
| weight (g/m2) | available widths (cm) | type | |
|---|---|---|---|
| TRANSJET® Eco II 8385 | 95 | 91,4 / 111,8 / 132 / 162 | quick drying |
| TRANSJET® Sportsline 9310 | 100 | 91,4 / 111,9 / 132 / 162 | adhesive |
| TRANSJET® Sportsline High Tack 9400 | 100 | 91,4 / 111,9 / 132 / 162 | strongly adhesive |
| TRANSJET® Boost 8340 | 70, 85, 130 | 91,4 / 111,8 / 132 / 162 | quick drying / economical |
| TRANSJET® Fashion 8300 | 45 | 91,4 / 111,8 / 132 / 162 | economical |
SubliColor from Sihl
The German company Sihl is a leading print media specialist in the rapidly expanding digital print market. As a high-performance international company, Sihl offers experience, technological expertise and a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the industry. Although it has not been in the transfer paper market for very long, its size has put it immediately at the global quality forefront and makes it one of the biggest "players" in the market and within the industry.
| weight (g/m2) | available widths (cm) | type | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SubliColor Sports Paper | 75, 90 | 111,8 / 132 / 162 | adhesive |
| SubliColor Sports Paper HiTack | 90 | 111,8 / 132 / 162 | strongly adhesive |
| SubliColor Impact Paper 110 | 112 | 111,8 / 132 / 162 | quick drying |
Transfer paper
Transfer paper is a medium used in digital sublimation printing. Special sublimation ink is applied to it by digital printers in the form of a mirror image. This is then transferred to the final medium. There are different quality variants of transfer paper, where each of the variants is the ideal solution for a certain type of media. The final substrates that are printed by digital sublimation printing have different properties and therefore each one of them, due to its properties, "suits" a different type of transfer paper. A practical example can be a comparison of a cheap thick polyester fabric, which needs a strongly adhesive paper (which will prevent it from shrinking during transfer) with a high-end sheet photo panel, which needs a thin paper with a minimum amount of coating (able to let water vapour through). Our portfolio contains products selected on the basis of many years of experience with different materials and every customer is able to choose from it a reliable product perfectly suited for their production.
Why use transfer paper ? It's a small investment, but a big saving.
We often encounter the question of whether transfer paper is an "unnecessary" input cost and whether it is cheaper to use direct printing technology. Despite the additional input cost of printing, the most common answer (with some exceptions) is no. There are a number of reasons why even our largest customers use transfer paper for production:
The quality of the print is affected by the quality (in this case, rather the surface continuity) of the medium in any print. If you are printing directly onto a polyester textile, such as a flag fabric, the liquid ink hits the braided polyester fibres and is, logically, dispersed by capillary movement. If you print, for example, a square in this way, it will spread evenly to all sides, but its corner will no longer be sharp, but rounded. If you print the same square on transfer paper with a perfectly flat surface, the square will look as it should. It will also transfer with sharp edges on subsequent transfers. The transferred pigment does not creep up the filaments, so the transferred image remains sharp at all times. Direct sublimation printing cannot be used on "hairy" materials such as carpets, bath towels and the like. Transfer paper also absorbs the water base of the ink used, which can be visible in some cases when fixed, creating patterns in unprinted areas.
Save on materials. On direct printing, you can only achieve quality comparable to transfer if you use a coated fabric - but this will increase costs, and here the more coated, the lower the ink penetration you can achieve. So you have to decide whether you want a flag with good print quality, for example, or the depth of the overdye - so that it is not white on the other side. Given that the material is coated by the manufacturer, the problem is to find a compromise between these options. With transfer paper, you don't face these problems and the sharpness of the print is not at all at the expense of the discolouration of the fabric.
You can also print stretch products with transfer paper on printers that cost a fraction of the price of those that are designed for it. Even slightly "stretchable" materials are often a problem for direct printing, as they would be deformed by shifting in the printer. If you print any image on a stretched fabric, once it is released, the dimension, saturation, recoloring, of the image changes, making it completely impossible to produce, for example, clothing. With transfer paper, this problem does not play a role, given that you are printing on paper. Of course, there are also machines on the market that can print on stretch textiles with "sticky belt" technology, but these cost on the order of multiples of the price of similarly powerful "ordinary" printers.
Classification
In terms of properties and use, we divide high-quality (beware, the classification looks different for low-quality) papers into three basic categories:
The adhesive papers have a heat-activated adhesive on their surface that causes the transfer paper to stick to the material, thus significantly eliminating the possibility of damaging or defacing the product by shifting or shrinking the fabric during the transfer process, which takes several seconds. Its economic strength is that it allows the use of cheaper input materials. An investment of a few cents for adhesive paper allows you to seamlessly print, for example, cheaper Asian materials and thus save up to a third of their price. The downside is that due to the adhesive on the surface, they are not able to suck up the ink base as quickly, so you can't exploit their potential on ultra-fast printers with a production capability of, say, 150m 2 per hour. Another classification: moderately adhesive are suitable for lower weight products and stretch fabrics. A specific but very popular group are the strong adhesive papers, which are very suitable for high shrinkage materials and can "hold" even really thick fabrics. They are not entirely suitable for use with stretch materials.
Quick-drying papers are primarily designed for high-speed printers, their surface is specially treated to remove as much liquid as possible from the ink used. They can dry incredibly fast and are virtually instantly dry after ink application and can be rolled up even when printing at tremendous speeds. Their surface usually resembles chalk paper. They do not contain glue. They are suitable for sportswear, "fashion", metre textiles, as well as hard substrates.
Economical ones are aimed at low cost, usually have a low grammage, but can be used in many industries. They do not contain adhesive and are suitable for sportswear, "fashion", metre textiles, but also hard substrates.