[shifuimam]

Just curious. I'm trying to work out ICC profile problems and could use some help.

[Laminar]

Never done it. Is it like screenprinting?

[shifuimam]

No. It's a type of ink that transfers using a heat press.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

No. It's a type of ink that transfers using a heat press.

It isn't just used for prints on T-shirts, about 20 years ago dye sublimation printers were your best option for color prints on paper. Those printers back then typically only had a resolution of 300 dpi, but each pixel had the full 24 bit color depth. The print quality was great. Not sure why they died out, I thought they served a great purpose. Perhaps they were too niche.

[Thorzdad]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

It isn't just used for prints on T-shirts, about 20 years ago dye sublimation printers were your best option for color prints on paper. Those printers back then typically only had a resolution of 300 dpi, but each pixel had the full 24 bit color depth. The print quality was great. Not sure why they died out, I thought they served a great purpose. Perhaps they were too niche.

Welll, there are printers (Alps and Tektronix/Xerox) that call their printers dye-sub, but they aren’t, technically, dye-sub. The makers key on the heating and liquidation of the inks as dye-sub, but actual dye-sub vaporizes the ink into a sort of plasma for deposit into the print material. You can’t really do that with printer paper. You can do that with cloth, though, to great effect.

In the case of the Tektronix printer, it uses solid ink sticks which get heated, liquified, and deposited onto the surface of the paper. There’s no technical dye sublimation.

They still make the printers, so they haven’t died-out. But, yeah, they kinda are niche things.

The last place I worked at had a Tektronix Phaser 850 printer, and it was an amazing machine. Postscript, ColorSync, 1200dpi. It was easily the best printer I ever used. Absolutely perfect color. Made me look like a boss whenever I’d print a piece for review. The only real downside was, since the color was deposited onto the surface of the paper, you could easily scratch it off. That, and it was slow. At the high-quality setting, it ran at something like 4 or 6ppm. But, since I was the only person in the office that used it, that wasn’t a problem

[subego]

The last time I saw a dye sub print on paper was the same time I first saw Wolfenstein 3D.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by subego 

The last time I saw a dye sub print on paper was the same time I first saw Wolfenstein 3D.

For me it was the late 2000s, perhaps early 2010s. I had a small photo printer that was a dye sub printer, it was very cheap and the print quality great.

[shifuimam]

I really just want to solve my color issues. It's become such a tedious project to just get the right colors. I got a better ICC profile from the ink manufacturer, but it's still off.

As far as what is and isn't "technically" sublimation, what I'm doing is most certainly sublimation: the ink is sublimation ink, and requires both heat and pressure to properly transfer (via sublimation) to the target material, which has to be both polymer-based and temperature-resistant. I've been making use of an old high-resolution Epson photo printer with a CISS kit. My results have been pretty good for gifts and my own stuff, but the color's always off, and I can't sell anything until I get this sorted out.

I have both a heat press and a sublimation oven, so I'm making pretty much everything.