Years of  printing excellent ultra black film on our epson 3000 lead us to believe a similar size, brand spanking new, epson printer would do the same job or an even a better one, but unfortunately it was not the case. Epsons new Ultra chrome inks are unable to create films black enough for producing quality films for silk screen printing.  After the initial disappointment with the epson 4880s output to film we set about looking for a solution.

After several hours trawling the net it became clear the answer was accurips all black system. It was not the quickest decision to ditch all our coloured ink capabilities, as the colour print outs from this printer are amazing, but we were left with very little choice as creating good films is essential to creating good screens, is essential to creating good screen prints etc.

Finding a supplier of the all black system was not so easy, as it seems there is no UK supplier. Eventually we managed to find Serigraf a screen printing supplies firm in Ireland who were very helpful in sorting us out with everything we needed for the conversion. We spent an entire weekend colour printing to make good use of the no longer needed colour cartridges then set about purging the machine, and refilling with the black chromablast dye ink.

The resulting films are very, very good. The dye ink is as black as it gets, and combined with accurips software (I think this is the only RIP at present which offers an all black system) it is capable of producing extremely accurate half tone images.

The loss of our colour cartridges has been forgotten already as full colour T shirt prints become easier to produce, and this, ultimately, is our only requirement from this epson.

Related posts:

1. Halftone Dots and Screenprinting
2. Index Separation Method for Screen Printing
3. T-shirt printing:Gradients using half tone
4. 2009 Cornwall Film Festival
5. Discharge T shirt print using index separations