Diablo DTS System in Action

DIABLO DIRECT TO SCREEN SITE VISITS

http://www.oyo.co.uk

Last month Nick Greenfield, one of our System Engineers for the UK office, and I flew to California to visit some of the Diablo Direct to Screen installations that have been installed on the West Coast. I must say that the visit did wonders for our confidence in the product. The 3 sites we visited were all very complimentary and both the quality of output and the productivity that we saw match up to the claims that we had been making about the product.

This is the first of two blogs I will be writing about the trip, starting with our visit to Applied Pressure Inc.

Applied Pressure are a large T-Shirt printer based in Los Angeles. They print T-Shirts for Concert tours and also have a large annual contract with the National Basketball Association for printing NBA licensed T Shirt merchandise.

Applied have had their Diablo DTS system for just over 12 months. It was recently upgraded with the new Hysteresis firmware (v2) and new cable track management after problems with the earlier cable track design.

Applied have their Diablo installed in a very hot environment but experience relatively low humidity,…typically 30%.

The absolute temperatures sometimes get so high that they have to stop operation to let the Diablo cool down but the humidity levels are so low that they never have print adhesions issues except if the humidity gets so low as to be unmeasurable.

Typically they use 180 (70) mesh counts for white base coats and 305’s for the main colours. Michael explains “I try to use the highest mesh possible because you get more detail and it makes it easier if you are printing wet on wet”. Top white is usually a 280, Colours tend to be printed on mesh counts between 230 and 305. They normally coat 1&2 (1x print side 2x squeegee side) except for low mesh counts…. Will only use low mesh counts (110 or less-coated 2&3) for shimmer or glitter inks.

Applied use Ulano QTX (for ) and 925 (for Waterbase inks). They also regularly experiment with other emulsion types.

These coating techniques give them Rz values that are typically less than 10 (We measured an Rz of 9 on a 180 mesh).

Applied run their Diablo at +15% contrast for all mesh counts unless it gets really hot with very low humidity (less than 20%) when they have to increase the contrast for better print adhesion.

On very busy days, such as during the NBA season they may put as many as 150 screens through the Diablo utilising a single shift operation. Typically they will do 50-100 screens on more ’normal’ days..

Applied coat their screens no more than 1 day ahead. So they will start to coat screens for the next day in the afternoon of the previous days production.

Applied use 5,000 watt lamps in their UV exposure unit which gives them fast (approx 30 secs) exposure times. They replace the lamps approx every 12-18 months. Since they got the Diablo they have stopped using the lid on the Exposure unit and instead just gang the Screens up against the wall above the lamps.

Calibration was done with the Imaged screen using a Screen Reader before wash-out (IN FILM MODE). Michael Feezor, President of Applied, claims to be able to hold a 2% dot on press when preparing Screens with the Diablo. As Michael explains “We used to run these Ninja Turtle designs on film and we had to get them re-approved by the customer in New York after prepared the Screens using the Diablo because the Diablo Screens had so much more detail than the customer was used to. The customer had been running the job for years and this was the first time they actually got to see what the job was really supposed to look like!”

Part 2 of our Diablo West Coast visits will be posted next week.

Go to http://www.oyo.co.uk for more info on the OYO DTS and Film Imagesetter solutions.