Technological revolutions in textile printing

Widespread acceptance of demand-activated manufacturing architecture (DAMA) and just-in-time (JIT) sales and marketing concepts have placed tremendous pressure on textile printers. presently available continuous rotary screen printing equipment are often inflexible in terms of quick customer response and short runs. In the present article, an attempt has been made to review critically two technological innovations in textile printing, vii. xerography and ink jet printing. Out of these two, ink jet printing has achieved considerable success till the pre-production stage, i.e. sample printing, and R&D work is continuing in developed countries to perfect the technology for production printing. It is envisaged that bq the turn of this century, a customer instead of purchasing the printed fabric available in the stares may be able to scan the designs on computer, select the design and colour combination, or create the new design and load the information to the computer of the printer and get the printed length of the fabric with a design of his/her choice.