# How does dye sublimation work and what does it do and what is it good or bad?



## Guest (Mar 22, 2009)

Hi everyone. My brother and I are new to the t shirt custom designing business and I have done my research but I would like to hear from experianced people. What is dye sublimation and is it better then other methods of designing t shirts? Does it last longer? More durable? Crack? How would I go about doing this? Cost more? I really appreciate any help and advice I can get. Thanks.


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## DAGuide (Oct 2, 2006)

Here is a good starting point for you to learn from - General Information about Sawgrass Dye Sublimation Printing - MultiRIP Hybrid Software.

The key to understand with sublimation is that it only works with polyester (whether that is fabric or hard substrates with a polyester spray coating on it).

Good luck with your research!

Mark


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## vctradingcubao (Nov 15, 2006)

I would also like to add that on fabrics, you can "only" do sublimation printing on white or very light colored fabrics. Here's an PDF from hixcorp discussing the digital transfer printing process in general. It's old but the infos still holds true:

http://www.hixcorp.com/pdfs/digital info.pdf


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## Guest (Mar 25, 2009)

Aw thats a huge help. We plan to use 100% cotten so I guess dye is ruled out then since it only works on polyester. I didn't notice that when I was researching. Thanks so much.


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