Advantages

• The advantages of pigment printing are well known and the process has grown in popularity worldwide in recent years as it offers several advantages over other styles of printing. These include brilliant prints with high light fastness, ease of application in color matching, flexibility in its applicability to natural and synthetic fibers and avoidance of the final wash off resulted in a complete elimination of any effluent disposal problems.

·        Pigment printing is most economical printing process and allows maximum output of goods because of the elimination of washing off, quick sampling and high printing speeds.

·        The advantage of pigment printing is that the process can be done without subsequent washing.

·        Simple Application

- Simple technical process without wet after treatment

- Little requirements for machinery equipment

·        Pigment printing can be applied to all substrate which are of interest to the printer, including glass fibers, PVC and imitation leather, subject to some limitations in color depth. It is extremely well suited for color resist effects, for example under azoic and reactive dyes.

·        Mistakes in pigment printing can be recognized quickly.

·        Pigment printing presents the fewest problems for the printer of all coloration process, with respect to labour costs, equipment and reliability of production.

·        Applicability on all type of fibres

·        Progress in quality of pigment printing

- New synthetic polymers

                 - Good fastness properties, soft handle

Disadvantages

• The handle of printed goods is often unduly hard because of the large amounts of external crosslinking agents, and this necessities aftertreatment of the prints on breaking machine to produce some improvement.
• Print pastes, based on synthetic thickeners as applied in pigment printing, are sensitive to electrolytes to a higher or lower degree. Electrolytes reduce the thickening effect of synthetic thickeners. If a highly viscous print paste is printed on a fabric containing electrolytes, this print paste will lose viscosity and the print will start bleeding. The low viscosity print paste penetrates into the fabric. When printing on knitwear, this leads to an uneven penetration and thus uneven print result. Due to the penetration, the colour concentration on the fabric surface is reduced and the colour yield of the print decreases.
• Pigments are sensitve to crushing durinh roller printing, particularly where bulky materials and deep engraving concerned.
• When pigments are over printed the second paste has little effect.