Print Spot Colors and Halftones Without a RIP - Part Two - What You’ll Need.

What You’ll Need for No-RIP screen printing Film

You’re gonna need some supplies and equipment to do this. But it must meet the criteria of being cheap, effective, and simple.
1.) You’ll need a printer. I tested this on three printers: The C-120, the R1400, and my R1800. It works very well on all three, though the ink was not quite as dense on the C-120, it still worked plenty well enough to block the UV, and it gave me an excellent- EXCELLENT stencil.

2.) Now you’ll need to get yourself some after market ink. Pigment inks, like the OEM Epson Inks, probably will not lay down a dense enough ink cover to work properly. I have not tested this though, so maybe someone can help me out with that. For me, I can get Premiere Ink for my R1800 about $5.00 per cartridge. Now the great thing about cheap, after market inks is that, for the most part they’re all made of dye, instead of pigments. As long as you’re not printing inkjet transfers you’ll never notice the difference. For film, however, dye inks make a tremendous difference in the level of density you can achieve.

The best place in the world to get your aftermarket inks is www.inkjetcarts.us. You can get a whole set of replacement, refillable, spongeless cartridges very inexpensively.

They’ll try to tell you that you need to setup your printer to print only black inks, which involves putting cleaning fluids in all but one of your cartridge trays. Not so. Get the ink, don’t do anything fancy. Set yourself up to do some full color printing.

3.) Next, you need a film substrate.  I use two different kinds. For everyday spot colors I use Screen Printer’s vellum from www.SMRSoftware.com, I also use Ryonet’s R-film for highly detailed images. R-film is much more expensive than the vellum, but it works very well, and is cheaper than most other film brands.

There is another reason I recommend fast drying film: if you’re not using fast ink you’ll have to be careful when your film comes out of the printer as it is very prone to smudging. The film itself facilitates a faster drying time. This isn’t a problem with the vellum however. It dries pretty fast, as well.. This does work on regular transparency paper, but it takes about ten minutes for the film to completely dry up before you can use it. You’ll also have to be very careful when handling it, or it will smudge all over the place, or even run.

That’s it. That’s your supplies. Move on to part three to learn how the process works.