Answered: Is Fabric Printing Ink Too Expensive?

When choosing a fabric printing ink for your production line, it may be easy to go with the lowest option. After all, price variations can be big, and choosing a less expensive ink might save you a huge amount of money during the buying decision.

But, in the long term, how much would this cost your business?

What does this entail for the quality of your finished product and your customer’s satisfaction?

To explain why opting for the low-cost alternative results in higher costs in the long run, consider the following factors that can affect ink prices. This article will assist you in making the best choice for your business when it comes to fabric printing ink.

3 Factors That Impacts the Prices of Ink

Factor 1- Different types of ink

The type of ink used for printing is an important consideration. Reactive inks and sublimation inks, for instance, are the most extensively applied in digital textile printing, resulting in cost savings and more advancements from development efforts. Pigment inks, on the other hand, are a comparatively new discovery in digital textile printing and are significantly more difficult to manufacture.

The dye in the ink is also another factor that greatly influences the price. One of the costliest elements is a dye, and the more dye utilized, the more costly the ink becomes. To keep costs down, many lower-cost inks (B-brands) employ less dye. As a result, the colouring strength is reduced, and more ink per square metre is required. So, trying to compare A-brand and B-brand waterbased ink pricing is just like comparing apples with oranges.

Factor 2- Different colors

Ink cost is affected not just by the amount of dye required, but also by the colour itself. However, in digital printing, pricing disparities between colours are fewer than in rotary screen printing.

People are used to varied pricing per colour of printing paste in rotary textile printing. For instance, black dye is quite inexpensive, although blue dye is among the most expensive. These pricing variances also apply to digital ink, but the density of colour in the ink somewhat mitigates them.

One more distinction between rotary and digital textile printing is the fact that digital textile printing always uses the very same 6 to 8 base colours. The inkjet printer can produce 16 million colours using these base colours. As a result, the proportion of those base colours utilized by a given client remains essentially stable over time. As a result, varied pricing per colour, as done in screen printing paste dyes, makes good sense in digital. Because the utilization is consistent, calculating the average cost over the 6 to 8 base colours is simple, and the average price stays unchanged.

Factor 3- Purification process

Despite the fact that ink prices have dropped dramatically over the years, digital ink was never as low as traditional printing paste. After all, digital dye constantly necessitates purification to eradicate inherent by-products such as minerals and salts.

These natural residues are not a concern for screen printing in traditional printing. They will, unfortunately, cause rusting in the print heads of digital textile printers. Dyes used in digital textile inks must be refined because even minor damage can cause jetting issues.

Since this purification procedure might take a lot longer – a few hours to even days – digital textile printing inks can never be as cheaper as traditional printing pastes. Lower priced companies are likely to cut their prices by purification the inks lesser adequately, and it also increases the risk of print head damage.

Conclusion— Buying Top-Quality Fabric Printing Ink

If you are looking for the right type of fabric printing inkor waterbased ink, you can count on DAS Waterbased Ink. We are one of the leading and most reliable ink suppliers at a very competitive price.