Colour your floors with digitally printed carpets

The walls of a store are often cluttered with signages, so how can you think alternatively that your signs get noticed? Simple, use floor carpets with your advertising message, just spread it on the floor and anyone who happens to enter the store would surely notice it. USA-based Ultraflex Systems is one such company, which offers carpet especially made for solvent inkjet printing.
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 Digital printing has made inroads into various segments of the signage industry and has made myriad applications possible – huge billboards, vehicle wraps, building wraps and now even floors have turned into a huge advertising space. Floor graphics, interactive floor visuals and now carpets. These carpets can be solvent-printed and can turn any floor into an advertising sign.

Ultraflex Systems Inc, manufacturer and worldwide distributor of diverse options of digital solvent, UV and screen printing substrates, has teamed up with Printing Carpets to offer winning solutions of printable carpet for digital solvent, UV and dye sub printers. Ultraflex stocks the finest European looped carpet available and can offer printers the technical support they need to succeed in the relatively untapped (yet quite profitable) market.

Ultraflex has spent the last year investigating and thoroughly testing printable carpet options available globally and they were impressed with what Printing Carpets of The Netherlands had to offer. Together, they now offer optical white carpet in three stock widths that can be used on wide format printers such as VUTEk, Scitex, Matan, NUR, MacDermid Colorspan and Gandinnovation’s Jeti.

The company offers Ultra Solvent Carpet, which is a white tufted pile carpet especially made for solvent inkjet printing. It prevents ink scratch off and keeps drying time minimal. It is best suited for indoor, digitally printed carpet or doormats. Ultra Solvent Carpet is engineered for indoor use but can be used outdoors for short durations and is ideal for corporate lobbies, waiting areas, foyers and trade show booth floor graphics.

 Ultraflex printable carpet was a huge hit at SGIA ’06. Many of the industry’s top companies featured Ultraflex carpet as the carpeting for their booths; the SGIA booth was covered with Ultraflex carpet and it gained a lot of attention at the show. The carpet image was designed to encapsulate the look of hardwood, stained wood, sand and tile flooring – all on one carpet. The carpet was a total 6.09 meters (20 feet) long and 15.24 meters (50 feet) wide. It was printed on a solvent inkjet device, using the “textile mode” on the roll-to-roll printer in four colours with 800 percent saturation, which allowed the carpet images to pop. The tight, finely-looped nature of the carpet kept stray fibres from clogging up the printheads, which generally is the most expensive component of a digital printer. To avoid clogging the printheads, specialty imagers may pull the printheads higher up from the carpet. However, this process produces an overspray and ends up failing to achieve the image definition. The low profile, lightweight and coated back of the carpet allows flexibility in the material and an ability to be loaded onto the printer in a roll. It’s similar to the way banner material is loaded onto a printer, but the rolled carpet takes up significantly more space than banner material would. The benefit of using a roll rather than hand-feeding the carpet is that the image can be printed on one carpet piece, thus reducing the chance of material waste.

Because of the printing process, digitally printed carpets don’t last long, which is why they are primarily used for special events and trade show markets. However, print shops have internally found that the carpets can hold up to heavy customer traffic for six months to a year with extra protection from coatings, such as Scotchgard by 3M.

For more information, visit www.ultraflexx.com, or e-mail at info@ultraflexx.com