Laser heat transfer papers have always been a tricky transfer process to perfect, especially since that the same basic principle to transfer the image to the shirt is used to apply the image to the paper. This makes it nearly impossible for some transfer papers to run through your printer without wanting to make a t-shirt inside (not the best place for t-shirts to be made) and sticking to everything. But then again, transfer paper is a thick media – the printer can’t run too coolly, otherwise you’re just going to end up with messy, streaky prints. These battling facts have always made it pretty difficult to support and provide papers for a wide range of printers that are likely not to work with them.
This is what makes the entry of the OKI Data LED laser printers so appealing. Even with the entry-point OKI C831TS printer, you’re getting a printer that is capable of rich, beautiful prints across a wide range of papers, including self-weeding favorites like ImageClip Laser Dark and Digi-Trans. And, it prints up to 11” x 17” and has plenty of features to make it equally efficient for in-house office printing on the penny. It’s common knowledge that laser printed images are a fraction of the cost of inkjet, but now laser printer users don’t have to sacrifice print quality for efficiency and cost! The business friendly C831TS isn’t the only trick OKI has up its sleeve in the new LED laser line, however – they also mixed things up in the color department.
Why Would You Need To Print With White?
It’s pretty easy to look at a printed sheet of paper and realize a printer added color to it – but what most people don’t think about is the white parts of the image! Printing is an additive process, that is, the printer adds ink (color) to the page. But the page starts out white – so when you print something with “white text” the printer actually hasn’t printed anything in that text-shaped-area at all! Apply this concept to heat transferring images to apparel, and there’s many more variables at play, especially on colored or black fabrics. In that case, the ‘page’ that you are starting out with is not white, so the printer must create this white base instead!
Various printing processes have adopted many different ways of accomplishing this – normal heat transfer papers for dark and colored fabrics use a thicker sheet of polymer that is an opaque bright white, screenprinters apply a white underbase, and direct to garment printers print an initial layer (or two) of white ink. And now, OKI has revealed their own crafty way of printing a white underbase, by developing a printer that switches out the black toner for white toner, and a driver that applies a varying layer of white onto the back of the colors to “fill-up” a white underbase per-color. So why is the fact that OKI printers being able to print white so cool? Well, we’re kind of back to the fact that printers don’t really print white.
Why White Toner Prints Excel with Self-Weeding Media
Self-weeding papers for dark shirts work in a very straightforward, but surprisingly confusing way – they transfer what is printed. Boldly printed – anyways. So the fact that printers don’t actually print anything for white, and print very very little onto a page for pastel and light colors, means that the self-weeding process won’t actually work on them. Photographs would become splotchy where ever there are highlights or light colors, color gradients can drop out randomly, and distressed designs transfer even more distressed looking (unfortunately).
However, when printing with a white toner printer, this opens up the door completely. With a printer able to create it’s own underbase white in the printed image, this allows self-weeding papers to easily and consistently attach to the full image. All in all, a t-shirt that you can very easily sell without having to go through a lengthy trimming process, or consider a multitude of color and design variables before determining which transfer paper is best.
The OKI proColor White Toner printers are the perfect workhorses for the job, and Coastal Business offers two models that are sure to fit any business model that could have previously considered a direct to garment printer. The OKI C711WT printer is the smaller of the two, with a maximum print size of 8.5” x 14” and the 920WT the larger, printing up to 12” x 18”. Both machines handle exceptionally large media as well with their straight-through feeding multi-purpose media tray, and print costs hover around just $0.30-$0.50 per sheet, depending on the image size and print-quality settings, of course. Plus, the white toner printers now have media developed specifically to their unique abilities: the FOREVER self-weeding Laser Dark paper offers unbelievable detail, color, and softness in self-weeding transfers as well as the opportunity to decorate with unique metallic foil and retro-flocked effects!
With the newest OKI family of laser printers for transfer paper printing, there’s a huge amount of possibilities and potentials out there – some even outside the color model you’re used to!