DSF

Hey all, so all my gear turned up at long last, I installed the ink and did a print, image came out looking like it was taken on a 1mp camera, so I put it in the mug press and it turned out really bad, I got my ink from ebay and same with the paper so I am thinking it may be both. Apart from Sawgrass and that what other brands of ink are good and what paper is advised?

Buy a decent paper like Trupix or Texprint so you can see the results of a high end paper. If it looks pixelated it could be on the wrong side of the paper but going cheap on paper is not really an option. You also need continuity so both ink and paper need to be readily available where you are. If you don't know what brands you currently have you may as well start again.

What dpi was your image? Although some stuff might look ok on the monitor they print pixellated. Try a higher res image before you start blaming the hardware.

Apart from Sawgrass, Inktec's Sublinova has been on the market a good few years, and is a reliable brand, which is readily available from Ebay, but there's a lot of cheap unbranded stuff on there too.

Hey all, thanks for your comments, the image DPI was only 75dpi so I bumped it up to 300DPI, it made a huge difference to the image, however the colours are not mixing all that well, I did a test print using the LGBTI flag and while most of the colours are correct the purple came out as a dark red and the blue was more of a dark blue.

I am leaning towards the ink just being cheap and the fact it is no name ink and I can not find a ICC profile for it would make a big difference. I will look at Inktec's ink and see about changing over to them, however for text and basic stuff this ink I have does a bloody good job but it just sucks at mixing the colours.

Yeah, an ICC profile for the inks you use is crucial in getting a decent printout.

If you make your own designs for mugs, do them all at 300dpi. If you are importing images from another source make sure they are large images, around 2Mp or more. It's no good enlarging a small image, or just changing its dpi, it will still be pixellated. You can sometimes get away with enlarging smaller images using proprietary software, or Photoshop plugind designed to do the job, but nothing beats an original image at the correct size.

Thank you all for your help, while the colours are not blending correct I have been given the green light to go into production also might have the contract for a local cafe as well.