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Everyone is familiar with traditional printing, now let's try to illustrate the difference with DIGITAL INKJET printing.
Let's compare them to understand how and when it is preferable to use one or the other. First of all, however, it seems necessary, for the sake of understanding the issue, to briefly explain the reasons that led to the birth and affirmation of digital printing, which is now proposed almost as an alternative to traditional printing. The constant evolution and continuous acceleration of fashion has meant that the textile sector has had to solve a series of problems related to the preparation of print collections, mainly regarding time, costs, and risks. In fact, to create a design in traditional printing, it is first necessary to create the printing tool, whether it is the frame or the cylinder. This implies time and logistics for the management and storage of the equipment itself. The minimum time to create the printing equipment varies from one to two weeks depending on the period in which they are engraved (i.e., in season or out of season) and the complexity of the design. As for costs, the creation of the aforementioned printing equipment represents a cost that needs to be amortized over the printed meterage, which means that if the meterage decreases, the amortization increases. Finally, it should be considered that the equipment costs are at risk, as it is impossible to know exactly, at the time of engraving, what the sales results will be and consequently the meters printed on which the amortization will be calculated. Furthermore, it should be taken into account that the textile market currently records a significant decrease in the quantities sold per design, with a consequent increase in the amortization costs of the equipment. Another factor to consider is the economic crisis that began at the end of the 1990s, which led to an ever greater customization of print designs, with a consequent reduction in batch quantities. The fragmentation and splitting of printed quantities across multiple designs did not allow for sufficient recovery of engraving and collection setup costs. On the other hand, fashion has developed a tendency to stimulate customers with a continuous offer, unrelated to the changing of the seasons, imposing significant changes in clothing within the same year. In light of the above considerations, digital printing presents itself as an interesting alternative because: it eliminates equipment costs, since there is no need to engrave frames and cylinders, leaving only the cost of digital processing; it reduces the technical time to present new designs; it reduces and almost eliminates the amortization costs of printing equipment; it eliminates the costs of print supplements due to small quantities; it eliminates technical problems that limit creativity in traditional printing; it has no limits to design customization. Nevertheless, digital printing also has some limitations, the most significant of which is the issue of processing costs and production times. The processing cost, which should be understood as excluding the amortization of printing equipment, is significantly higher than that of traditional printing due to the limited quantitative production today. By this we mean the reduced amount of production per unit of time; in fact, on average, this is quantifiable at about 600/800 meters per day with good print resolution, compared to 3000/4000 meters per day with a hand-machine and 7200/8000 meters per day with a rotary cylinder printer (considering only the actual printing time). The consequence is that above certain quantities, delivery times are extended, significantly reducing the overall advantages of digital printing, due to the obvious need to repeat the sampling effects in production. An interesting use of digital printing, which overcomes this drawback, could consist in sampling, leaving production to traditional printing. However, this solution also brings some problems, the first of which is the loss of chromatic possibilities and effects achievable in digital. In fact, if production is planned in traditional, the sampling must also comply with the color and effect limits achievable in the same way. The other problem is the correspondence between sampling and production, since printing takes place with totally different methods, as does the color configuration, and it is inevitable that the results will be different. Finally, there is a cost issue: in the case of future production in traditional, one cannot consider a real absence of equipment costs since the films will have to be made and the frames or cylinders will still have to be engraved as needed. At this point, I believe that, despite great technological progress in digital printing, it does not really allow for a reduction in the associated times and costs, but rather represents an excellent support for traditional printing, as it makes it possible to create designs that would otherwise be impossible with engraving. This implies accepting the costs and production times, but also carefully planning the choice of the market segment to which to propose the digitally printed product, with the great advantage of almost unlimited creativity. Finally, I would like to mention that all these considerations apply to the printing of fabric meterage for clothing and furnishing, while different considerations apply to printing for accessories such as scarves, shawls, and the like. In this case, the possibility of having the finished item in a very short time allows for time advantages both in the creation of the proposal and in production, as well as an almost infinite chromatic possibility, which makes digital much more convenient than traditional printing. The last point I would like to address concerns a purely aesthetic aspect of the comparison between traditional and digital. In fact, the possibility of reproducing an infinite range of colors and graphic possibilities, such as photographs, has meant that, especially at the beginning of digital printing, a bit of everything was printed, without paying much attention to style, resolution, and the actual beauty of the subject used, resulting in "cheap" effects that consumers have shown they do not appreciate. Today, digital is treated with the same care in design as traditional printing, but the risk of necessarily wanting to show all the chromatic potential of this type of printing is always lurking. At textile fairs, there are often fabrics of little aesthetic value and very similar to each other, precisely because extremely colorful but poorly designed patterns risk appearing only as variants of one another. It is therefore essential never to lose sight of the fact that, despite the ease of this type of printing and the need for less technical expertise to carry it out, given the absence of tools and color preparation, good quality and competitiveness of digitally printed products become essential. These requirements are the result of careful design study, extreme aesthetic and chromatic attention, and respect for the basic principles of textile design. Only in this way can digitally printed fabrics have the same aesthetic dignity as those printed traditionally, and indeed become a textile type worthy of interest not only economically, but above all qualitatively.
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