Color properties of disperse dye inks and pigment inks on polyester fabrics

Abstract

Dye inks and pigment inks are two kinds of inks for digital inkjet printing of textiles. As commercial inks, dye inks are more widely used in digital printing of textiles. But dye inks are just suitable for specific fiber fabric, such as disperse dye inks are only suitable for inkjet printing of polyester fabrics and reactive dye inks just for protein and cellulose fibers. Frequent change of inks is not only tedious and time consuming, but also wastes inks. Pigment inks are suitable for inkjet printing of all kinds of fabrics, including polyester, silk, cotton, wool, et al. But pigment inks are not widely used in textile digital printing today because there are many problems not solved such as poor fastness and less brilliant colors. In this paper, the color properties of disperse dye inks and pigment inks were investigated and compared each other. Pure colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Light Cyan and Light Magenta were printed with disperse dye inks and pigment inks respectively on the same kind of polyester fabrics. The color properties such as K/S values and L*a*b* were measured. The corresponding ICC profiles were drawn respectively using the color data. Then color gamut of the two kinds of inks was calculated from the ICC profiles with RIP software. The differences of two inks printed fabrics were investigated and the reasons are analyzed. Although pigment inks exhibited poorer color property than disperse dye inks on polyester fabrics pigment inks could be used for digital inkjet printing of textiles.