Evaluation of Dye-Sublimation Printing Inks Used for Textile Printing

Abstract

Dye-sublimation printing is a modern digital printing technology that is being used more and more for textile printing. Classifying and identifying ink produced by the different manufacturers can be important to understand and analyse issues like document forgery, poor print quality, and printer service needs in the market. In this paper, we classify and evaluate the performance of dye-sublimation printing inks produced by six different manufacturers. The inks are evaluated in terms of colour and reproduction accuracy on two different textile materials. A weighting coefficient is introduced in the classification threshold to consider different customer requirements like quality, application, and process standardisation during classification. The obtained results indicate that with sufficient spectral measurement data, spectral angle calculated using the spectral angle mapper algorithm and the Mahalanobis distance between the inks, this would be possible.