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Shades of green

Shades of green JAPANESE followers of fashion can now buy the latest thing in sartorial elegance: fabrics printed with the same technology used by millions of computer printers worldwide. Canon, the electronics company and Kanebo, the clothing company, have developed the bubble jet textile printing system, which the companies say can be faster and more cost effective than traditional methods of fabric printing.

Bubble jet printers use an array of ink nozzles, each of which is about half the diametre of a human hair. The nozzles are heated and this causes the ink to form a bubble, which expands and shoots out of the end of the nozzle 6,000 times a second. Canon and Kanebo formed a technical alliance in 1990 to develop a bubble jet textile printer. This printer is a large machine which weighs 7,000 kg and stands 1.7m high. The printer has 16 print- heads, arranged in two groups to permit two-way printing. The printheads house an array of 1,360 nozzles, which are fed by up to eight ink stations. The machine has a print speed of 1 metre(m) a minute and can print fabric up to @3 1.65m wide. Each textile printer A costs about us $1 million.

The system can be used with a variety of materials, including cotton, silk, nylon, polyester and leather. Kanebo is marketing 4 bubble-jet printed scarves and ties, and there are also plans to develop suits, shirts, bags and sportswear 40 using the technology. A Japanese designer has produced leather 7 coats printed by the bubble jet system. The new system offers a number of advantages over traditional print systems: it offers higher quality than rotary screen printing and is faster than flat screen printing. The system is ideal for small production runs.

Producing a fabric, from design to sample printing, can take up to six weeks using the screen printing process, but the bubble jet system can cut this to three days. Designs can be created on a PC or fed in via a scanner or CD-ROM, edited, manipulated (the system offers more than 16 colours), and then printed. Bubble jet printing is also more environment-friendly because there is no waste water or ink.

Although the system is cheaper than traditional systems in short runs of up to 50 in of fabric, it is more expensive but compansates is when used for mass production. ;I However, despite the success of its bubble jet printers, Cation is keen to use it in other areas, including CD labelling, the textile industry and consumer electronics pro ducts. One idea is to build TV Sets with built-in bubble jet devices for printing information pulled from the Internet.

Canon launched the first bubble jet printer in 1981, and the company estimates that printers using bubble jet or similar technologies accounted for more than 70 per cent of the 42 million computer printers sold worldwide in 1996.

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