Man, I miss the good 'ole days of Reprographix

This is the place to talk about how to create film positives for screen printing. You may discuss topics like RIP software, inkjet and laser printers, film positive products, thermal printers and image setters.

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Hey Mikey
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Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 9:05 pm

Man, I miss the good 'ole days of Reprographix

Post by Hey Mikey »

....cameras

My career was basically doing Printed Circuit boards for a couple of decades. The customer would supply a negative, and we would reverse it into a positive using your basic silver based film and a couple of trays of fixer and developer in a dark room with red safe lights. Fast forward a decade or so, and one would still use film in a darkroom and feed it into a prcessor which is chain driven throught a series of baths and your product comes out the other end. This type of film is always the best. Best resolution, no saw tooth edges etc.

Today, I manufacture dial faces for aircraft instruments and today's current film sucks. Nobody has a Repro camera anymore and i'm reduced to buying pigment inkject garbage. For t shirts this is works out fine, but if anybody has ever looked up close at pigment type film, the lines are'nt perfect and there's some scattered little dots floating around. I acutally have an old AGFA Repro camera, but I have no room to build a darkroom and the investment in developer stuff might not be a good idea since I only spend about a $100 a week from my current supplier. Toner on laser film is not a good option due to opaqueness. Does anybody do any high tech hi quality printing? What film do you use?

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Catspit Productions
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Re: Man, I miss the good 'ole days of Reprographix

Post by Catspit Productions »

I use an Epson 1400 with my own water proof inkjet film positives. On an LED exposure unit we can get a known 85 LPI halftone off on a 355 mesh screen. The inkjet printer with RIP software and true vector art creates very smooth edges as far as I can see. The Epson 1400 was made for the ammeter photographic market so it has decent resolution.

My background is photography actually but I do not know if Kodak still makes direct duplicating films and they probably would be expensive anyway. I used process cameras and stat cameras years ago as well. There are thermal printers that will print thermal films but I still think the Epson 1400 has better resolution ultimately. I just examined a piece of my film with a 10x magnifier and I saw very straight, crisp lines and edges. No scattered dots or stray inks spots anywhere. It may be how you're outputting the film and with what software.... etc. It's important to work with vector art in my opinion.

I'm not sure what films graphic industrial printers use for very technical work like membrane switches and such but I do know your exposure unit can have a lot to do with your ability to achieve very fine detail.
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