Looks like Image Armor can’t leave well enough alone. They were playing with their pretreat formulas and created the newest pretreat formula to the DTG industry, and one Image Armor believes will become a massive hit! Hence the creation of Image Armor Platinum. This new solution is showing amazing print results on a range of garment colors, styles, and blends.
Some new to the business will ask: What is pretreatment? Well, pretreatment is a liquid solution used by direct to garment printers. Pretreatment is applied in liquid form on a shirt and then dried using a heat press or a dryer. This dried solution then acts like a primer or glue for the white ink to be printed upon, at which time the ink “flash cures” when it meets the primer or pretreatment. A CMYK color print can then be printed on the “flashed” white ink. You can think of the pretreat like when you paint primer on drywall to allow the final coat of paint to stay on top – in this case the ink stays on top of the garment instead of soaking into the garment.
The Platinum pretreatment will work on a wide variety of fabrics, including 50/50 blended Heather shirts. Note that NO pretreatment will cover an “air gap” (where the thread weave leaves open air spaces, but Platinum does a great job on making even 50/50's look great). On a pale yellow shirt, the Platinum created a super smooth white ink film resulting in a striking color contrast with the print. Typical pretreatment discoloration can be reduced with Platinum in its “Ready to use (RTU) form or by diluting Platinum with a tad more water.
Tri-Blends are always a challenge to print on, but Platinum can make this a little easier. Since there is polyester in the fabric content you can still run into dye migration issues, but Platinum does a great job of making these typically difficult to print fabrics much easier due to their new formulation.
Baby Blue 100% cotton shirts (the bane of our existence) can be a real challenge to pretreat without staining or discoloration. Platinum reduces this more than other pretreatment solutions. Image Armor won't claim it will totally get rid of that issue (that'd be lying) due to the fact that they can't control the residual chemicals/dyes often left in fabric from the mills or plants. But this can be mitigated a little bit by cutting it with water. THIS WILL REDUCE VIBRANCY, but on a baby blue shirt we’ll take not being stained and have a decent print.
From our own, AA Print Supply, limited testing on an Ecofreen Mister T1 we used both setting 4 (round trip) and setting 5 (also round trip). We would like to think it’s safe to say if you have used image armor before, keep your settings the same and get even better results. The whites are super opaque and make the colors stand out more. If you’re using an Ecofreen Mister T2 we would say using setting 20 or 30 round trip should have the same effect. Like we mentioned earlier, keep your settings the same and get even better results. One big thing we did notice is that we can use a little less pretreat and still get away with great prints.
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Steven De Hoff
Content Writer
Steven has 10+ years of experience in the E-commerce space with an emphasis in storefronts and product listings. A classical connoisseur of the internet, Steven spends his free time staying away from it. Instead choosing to be a dad and disc golfer.
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