HP Engineering has been busy.
We have some new products, and they are really remarkable products.
I'm holding in my hand a new soft textile, if you will, a fabric.
This is a fabric it was developed in a partnership with HP and Top Value Fabrics.
In Europe, they are known as Ulrich.
Top Value Fabrics has a series of soft textiles.
We call them treated.
The reason we don't want to call them coated is because coating traditionally associates
like a heavy kind of gluey surface that you would print with, say, a solvent printer or a UV printer.
That is not what this is.
These are treated fabrics.
Now, they do have a treatment to allow Latex to be highly ink receptive.
But most importantly, and this is the main development, we call them durable textiles.
Traditionally when we say durable, we mean UV light fastness,
which has always been excellent with Latex on textile.
They are pigment-based inks.
They have very, very good color fastness in...in, uh..sunlight,
much more so than sublimation, dye sublimation.
What this is, is durable to the scuff and scratch,
which is what most people think of when you say durable.
What we wanted to do was work to develop a treatment that could go on to soft textile,
maintain the soft hand of the textile, not have any odor, and also improve the scuff
and scratch resistance on.. uh.. when printing with latex inks, so that when you would fabricate it,
when you would handle it, when you would fold it, it would reduce the scuffing and
scratching because latex would sit on top of the fabric more, rather than have this
deep bond that you get with the sublimation process.
Our quality has really always been excellent, even on traditional, uncoated polyester.
But what this is, is a treated polyester, in which case, Top Value has introduced
a series of new products that will be available at SGIA 2017 in New Orleans.
And this is their, and for example, this is their DigiStretch Latex Performance.
This is a durable textile, and it has a one-dimensional stretch, so you can stretch it this way but not this way.
And this would be a perfect choice for a lot of standard textile printing.
And the scratch and scuff resistance is really excellent.
We've made considerable strides on the scratch and scuff resistance with these newer Durable Textiles.
And there's a whole group of them.
For example, this is the DigiLatex Performance.
This also is done already with a silicon edge graphics sewn into it,
which is the way a lot of fabrics are being displayed these days.
And it also has the fold-over pocket sewn in the bottom.
This is a beautiful fabric. Nice, thick, wonderful.
This is the Top Value Digi..
I think this is the Panorama.
Also, gorgeous.
Very, very nice.
And we significantly improved our scratch and scuff on it, so that you can handle this easier,
you can fabricate this easier.
It's just going to give you considerably more durability than we've had associated with latex in the past.
There's even this here.
Heavy.
This is the Supernova Latex Performance.
And then, this here is..
I think this is called the Brilliance.
Ah, Fascination.
This is the DigiFascination, which is very light.
It's almost like a sheer.
Beautiful material.
And all this is by Top Value.
And this is currently available for your Latex printers.
And it is a new treated Latex Durable Textile.
If you get a chance to come to New Orleans for SGIA, we're going to have this very highly featured.
We're going to have a lot of discussions about it.
This is a new product that we here at HP are very excited about because we've always had
excellent color fastness, we've had great quality.
What we really wanted was another step up on scratch and scuff resistance.
And, good news, we have some new back lit fabrics online for the scratch and scuff resistance
that would fit under the Durable heading.
And then there's other companies, too, that also..
This is Green Textile.
Now they've had this on the market for about a year now, a little more.
And this is the EnduraFab.
Green Textile was one of the first to develop a Durable treatments for HP Latex.
And this also falls under, um, a Durable Textile heading.
And the Green Textile.. both the Top Value Fabrics and Green Textile are widely available in
the United States and most of North America.
That's sort of the thrust of this is, I want to mostly focus on the US market,
but we also know that there is a worldwide textile printing market,
and we're looking to expand our partnerships and our relationships
with more and more companies that manufacture textile.
For example, we have anticipating fabrics online from Pongs, as well as from Berger,
and probably many more to come.
Because latex has always printed beautiful on fabric, but to be able to simply treat it,
and the latex chemistry now that we have for this fabric, it really opens up a lot of doors.
And then, just very briefly to show you another product.
This is natural fiber, and I talked about this in another video,
but this also does fall under the Durable label.
And this is the Expand DuraVibe.
This is their linen.
It's a cotton linen blend.
It is really beautiful.
It's Newport cotton linen.
Absolutely gorgeous.
And this is natural fiber.
Now, that's something unique that latex does very well is it's capable of printing on natural fibers.
And natural fibers look fantastic with latex water-based pigment inks.
This, for example, these were done as bandanas for the Coachella festival.
And this is, uh, the Expand DuraVibe textile.
It's a thin, 100 percent cotton.
And this cotton was used to print.
And then what we did is we found that there is some additional value for
the durability on natural fibers to heat-fix it.
That is, to put some more temperature on it.
So, this was probably running about 350 degrees through a clamshell press.
And that gave it some extra bond to the cotton.
And then we were able to make these into..think of it like temporary bandanas.
This isn't something you would necessarily make permanent clothing on, but it was a temporary
kind of bandana that was done for a short-term event.
These could be used very well in digital decor, certain types of home furnishings, more of the vertical market.
You're not.. you are still not going to have the durability to make a sofa out of it.
And if you do, please let me know.
I won't sit in it.
But we can do a great deal of other products within that same market.
And this is the DuraVibe.
These are natural fibers, and they are also available in the US.
So, that is our current portfolio of durable, soft textiles.
It includes natural textiles.
It also includes polyester textiles, both the Green and the Top Value at this time,
and we expect many more to come online very soon.
And when they do, I will make some more videos highlighting those products.