# Discharge and DTG



## stone (Jun 9, 2007)

Hello,

I saw a T-Jet DTG demo and a few samples and the printing on dark shirts falls short in my opinion. With a few passes of color ink a light shirt can look pretty good (although in my opinion a little faded, so maybe a bit more tweaking).

The dark shirts had the thick white underbase and after the final coating of color ink the print felt plastic like and had a shine to it. I was looking into it for retail sales of graphic tees, so in my opinion the thick graphic would not appeal to customers I target.

I know the Mimaki prints a discharge ink, and as far as I know it is just a heavy duty ink-jet printer.

I guess I am wondering why couldn't you use that mimaki discharge printer ink in any of these DTG's such as the t-jet which is a converted Epson.

The t-jet print head is identical to the original epson head unmodified by US Screen. The textile ink used in the printer is much thicker than the original photo ink used in the epsons. So it makes me wonder if you can throw anything through these printer heads since unmodified they can handle these thicker inks (albeit with constant maintenance).

Could you use all discharge inks in these things? Could you for instance use discharge inks from ryonet? If the ink is within range of what the print head could handle I can't image it not working.

The problem is these printers are expensive and there is no way you could test something like this unless you owned one.

Just curious if any owners out there have tried anything like this, perhaps replacing the white ink with discharge for your dark prints.

This would eliminate the pretreatment process too.

For now I am using a heat press with transfers, but I would much prefer something like a DTG that could handle white. Problem is I can't run these tests on a printer I don't have.

Thanks to anyone who can shed some light


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## splathead (Dec 4, 2005)

Unless Ryonet is selling discharge ink specifically for DTG's, their ink would be too thick.

Have you seen the video someone posted here on the Brother with a discharge silkscreen add-on? That could work.


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