Investing in new printing equipment requires a significant investment and often is the start of a long term relationship between your company and your printing partner. Of course, you want to make sure you make the right choice. To help you select the printing partner in China that best suits your company, I give you 5 essential tips that will guide you through the process.

1. Experience in the textile machinery industry

Although you want to work with the latest innovations in printing and stay ahead of your competition, you don’t want a printing partner that’s new to the industry and its equipment too. In order for a printing partner to advise you on choosing a printer and incorporating it in your current line of production, you need a printing partner that has extensive experience with likewise cases.

On top of that, choosing a printing partner with years of experience gives you the assurance that they will still be there in the years to come. Therefore, when choosing a printing partner, I always advise to look for a partner with a certain track record so you know you invest your time and money in the right, trusted partner.

Shanghai Meitu Digital Technology has more than 10 years of experience in the digital printer industry. It can provide you with a professional printer purchase solution.

2. Choose a printing partner that has extensive knowledge on textiles

Digital printing has its roots in the graphical industry. Since this industry was the first one to use this printing method, a lot of digital textile printers has been actually created by modifying graphical digital printers. Also all print heads used in those machines are designed to print to flat substrates such as paper or film. On those substrates, print heads can move very close to the surface, avoiding any drop positioning errors due to jet angle deviations. When printing to textiles, you want the heads to be as far away as possible from the surface of the textile. After all, textiles are three dimensional, almost living materials that can stretch, bubble and move.

On top of that, there are significant differences between each textile material. You need to be able to print on delicate silk fabrics as well as on heavy cotton canvases. As you might understand, printing on these kind of materials, requires a different kind of fabric handling that is much more challenging than printing on paper, that normally is always flat and straight. To move this large variety of different textiles through the machine at high speeds is not a trivial task.

When looking for a printing partner, I would definitely recommend searching for a partner that designs its printers especially for textiles and has a vaste experience in handling rolls of textiles through machines. When a printing partner designs their printers especially for textiles and uses print heads that allow for higher print head placement above the fabric, it shows that they have extensive knowledge and experience in the textile industry and can provide you the most appropriate equipment for your printing process.

3. Providing full after-service

Expanding your production facilities with a new printer requires a lot more than just purchasing the printer. After the purchase, you need to incorporate it into your production line, create the right conditions for the printer to function in and make sure your employees know how to work with it. Colors only come out the way you want them if you do proper color profiling, a job that requires quite some understanding of how colors are created in digital machines. So you will need support from an application specialist that is provided by the printer supplier.

During this process of incorporating the new printer successfully in your production line, it will help tremendously if your printing partner can provide you with the necessary support. Your printing partner can help you make the most out of your new printing equipment. That’s why you need them to be available when you most need them. When looking for a printing partner.

Shanghai Meitu Digital Technology Co., Ltd. provides comprehensive after-sales service. We are headquartered in China, but we can send our technical engineers to your country for repairing when you can't solve any problems in the process of using the printer. This is our world -- class support.

4. How sound is your digital printer supplier for the years to come?

When you invest in a new digital production technology, you want to be sure that the party that supplies you with the machines and inks will be around for years to come. As digital developments are moving fast, and use electronics that might get obsolete quite fast, you want to be sure that the company that supplies you will be able to do so in the coming years. So it is wise to check the credibility of a company and how financially sound they are.

5. Manufacturers' technical capabilities and sustainable development

When choosing a digital printing machine, it is important to examine the technical capabilities and sustainable development capabilities of the manufacturer, mainly in:

(1) What is the R&D power of the manufacturer? The R&D strength of the manufacturer determines the market competitiveness of the manufacturer's products, whether the equipment used can keep pace with the times, whether it can be upgraded, whether it can have a new generation of products to meet the requirements of future development.

(2) The degree of support of the manufacturer for the entire process. In particular, the process of direct-injection digital printing is relatively complicated. There are fabric sizing, printing and drying, steaming, washing, and finishing, and any one of the control errors will affect the quality of the final product.

Therefore, it is especially important to get technical support from the manufacturer for the whole process, which is reflected in the cooperation of the slurry and the fabric, the cooperation of the ink with the machine and the nozzle, the cooperation of steaming, washing, finishing and printing.

We will share more knowledge about the digital printing industry. Buying a printer requires a lot of expertise, such as how digital printers work, the choice of nozzles, the choice of ink, the difference in printed fabrics, the size of the machine, and more. These key factors directly determine whether you can choose the most cost-effective machine. Therefore, in the following series of articles, we will continue to update the important considerations for the purchase of the machine.