The chemistry behind it requires more than a couple of paragraphs of explanation, but a quick overview would be that polyester is required for this process for the particular inks to bond - this can be either a polyester textile, a polyester-blend textile, or a coating with polyester in it.

We use two methods of printing - transfer sublimation and direct to fabric - allowing us to cover all applications.

Transfer means we print to a paper, then heat-press transfer that image onto a textile. Direct-to is exactly that. We take a textile and print directly to the textile that then gets heat-pressed to fix the inks.

Flags, banner and outdoor fabrics are generally printed direct to the media to give the best showthrough (ink through to the reverse side) and longevity. Using a high-energy disperse dye ink lasts the longest.

Super Colour is New Zealand's most versatile dye sublimation printer, supplying both unfinished (bulk printed) textile in rolls to finishers, or finished textile products like flags, billboards, marquees and silicone edged graphics. Pretty much anything soft signage.

Silicone Edged Graphics

Silicone Edge Graphics (SEG) is possibly the most exciting Large Format product we've seen.

It's fair to say that New Zealand has been a little slow to catch up with this International trend, but it's here now and gaining popularity daily.

What makes for a good Silicone Edge Graphic?

All of the best textile prints we've seen are done with the dye sublimation process. A latex-ink printed fabric will be good, but it doesn't have the same performance characteristics and really doesn't look that great when held near a dye-sub print.

It's more involved and technically challenging to produce a good dye sublimation print for Silicone Edge Graphics - especially a backlit print - but it is generally more cost effective because a lower-cost fabric can be used.

There's such a small amount of stretch in the fabric and you have to be millimeter perfect to ensure no wrinkles or warped images exist in the finished and installed print. Each and every graphic gets tested in a frame before it goes out the door.

The high-quality fabric we use has the right characteristics for the job. In addition to the perfect amount of stretch, our product has a coating to allow proper ink penetration into the textile and has light diffusing properties which come into play when you're backlighting your product.

Each lightbox we manufacture is tested for consistency of brightness and diffusion of light, this ensures that every single backlit change out is consistent and perfect.

Above all, to produce the best Silicone Edge Graphics, you need to have profiled your fabric to your inks and viewing conditions. There's a heavy investment in colour management here at Super Colour - it's what we pride ourselves on. We consider our backlit profiling to be the best there is.

In addition to our six colour expanded-gamut ink set our fabric is the widest there is. The largest Silicone Edge Graphic system is only limited to our roll width, which is 3.2m wide.

Flags

We produce a lot of flags in varying types:

As licensed manufacturers of FlagTrax Streetflags we can supply Flagtrax street flags.

Unfinished Textile (printed only)

We can supply you printed and pressed fabrics for you to finish. Our machines are so quick that we can produce up to 250 square metres per hour of finished textile (depending on fabric and finish) and on larger runs we're generally a more cost effective option for our clients than producing inhouse themselves.

Super Colour stocks a number of fabrics, but we can also create profiles and print/press client supplied fabrics for specific applications and requirements.

Colour matching is a specialty and if you have specific saturation and colour requirements we can work with you to meet your expectations.

Other Products

We're constantly working on developing product. Presently we're experimenting with marquee tents, outdoor furniture (think structural beanbags) in addition to the products we already produce: