Sublimation Printer Guide: Laser vs. Inkjet, and What Sublimation Cannot Do

A sublimation printer does not print onto a material, it prints into one. Sublimation ink goes down on transfer paper, the paper is pressed against the blank, and under heat and pressure the ink turns to gas and bonds with polyester fibers or a polymer coating. The result has no hand-feel and no edge, because the ink ends up in the substrate rather than on it. That is what gives sublimation its continuous-tone, photographic look on apparel and hard goods, and there is no printed layer sitting on the surface to crack or peel — as long as the substrate cooperates.

Here is the part most sublimation content leaves out until after you have bought a printer: sublimation will not work on untreated cotton, and it will not show up on dark garments. Those are not settings problems or technique problems. They are chemistry. Read the next two sections before you spend anything, because this is where nearly every beginner gets burned.

One more thing worth saying at the top, because it shapes the rest of this guide. There are two ways to build a sublimation printer, and they fail in completely different places. Almost every desktop sublimation printer on the market is an inkjet, and the most common complaint in this whole category has nothing to do with color or speed — it is clogged printheads, missing nozzles and dried ink in a machine that sat unused for a fortnight. There is a second route: a laser dye-sublimation printer that lays down dry toner instead of liquid ink. Signwarehouse carries sublimation printers across three price tiers, including that laser machine, along with the ink, paper, blanks, presses and EasySubli film that go with them. The hardware section below is built around that choice.

How sublimation works

Sublimation ink is a disperse dye. You print it onto coated transfer paper with a printer built for that ink, and nothing much happens at that stage — the print looks dull and washed out on the paper, which is normal.

The reaction happens in the heat press. Under sustained heat and firm pressure the dye skips the liquid phase and turns straight to gas, while the polyester fibers (or the polymer coating on a mug or metal panel) open up. The gas enters that open structure, the press releases, everything cools, and the polymer closes around the dye. The image is now part of the material rather than a layer sitting on it.

That mechanism explains both the upside and the limits:

• No hand-feel at all. No film, no plastisol, no vinyl. Run your hand over a sublimated shirt and you cannot find the print, and there is nothing to crack or peel.
• It needs polyester or a polymer coating. Cotton has no polymer for the gas to bond into, so the dye sits on the surface and washes out. The lower the polyester content, the less there is for the dye to bond into, so a blend reads lighter and more washed out than the same artwork on 100% poly — a legitimate style choice, but not a full-strength print.
• The ink is translucent and there is no white. Whatever color the shirt or mug already is becomes your background. On a black tee the image is effectively invisible; on navy or red poly, artwork shifts toward that color. Light and white substrates are where sublimation lives.

Accept those two rules going in and sublimation is a superb process. Find them out afterwards and you have bought the wrong tool for the job.

What you can and cannot sublimate

Sublimation works on two families of goods.

Polyester and poly-blend apparel, in lighter colors

White and pastel 100% polyester performance shirts are the ideal case: full color, edge to edge. Poly-blends work with reduced saturation, and anything below roughly 50% poly is not worth the paper. Stock light poly bodies from the apparel blanks range and test one before you commit to a run, because dye loading varies between mills.

Polymer-coated hard goods

This is where the process is at its most direct: the dye goes into the coating itself, so a hard good comes out continuous tone with nothing raised on the surface. A blank only works if it was manufactured with a sublimation-receptive coating, and that coating is what makes it printable — a mug from the grocery store will not take an image. Stainless steel travel mugs, aluminum sports water bottles, Duraluxe aluminum panels and mouse pads are all made that way. Buy purpose-made stock from the sublimation blanks line, such as the HTX Sublimation Blank White Mouse Pad 7.75 x 9.25 at $19.95 — a cheap way to prove out your color profile before you touch a customer's order.

What you cannot sublimate: untreated cotton, canvas, leather, uncoated ceramic, uncoated metal, uncoated wood, and dark garments of any fiber content. There is no ink, paper or press setting that changes this.

The workaround for cotton and darks

There is one legitimate way around both limits. Instead of sublimating directly into the garment, you sublimate onto a white printable carrier film, cut it, weed it, and heat-press that carrier onto the shirt. The polyester requirement is satisfied by the film rather than the fabric, and the film's own white base gives you opacity on dark colors.

Two products do this. Siser EasySubli is a sublimation-specific printable HTV designed to take sublimation ink and press onto cotton, blends and dark garments with a genuinely soft hand for a vinyl product. Logical Color SubliDARK Print Printable HTV Sheets at $20.10 do the same job in sheet form and are an easy first test. Both sit inside the wider printable heat transfer vinyl category if you want to compare them against inkjet and laser printable films.

Be realistic about the trade-off. You have added a cutting and weeding step, a consumable cost per print, and a visible edge where the carrier sits on the fabric. It solves the cotton and dark problem but it is no longer the zero-hand-feel process that made sublimation attractive. For a handful of dark shirts a week it works well; for volume dark-garment work, read the next section.

Choosing a sublimation printer

The hardware question splits three ways — a cheap machine to find out whether the process suits your work, a desktop printer that can carry a real shop, and large-format equipment for production runs. All three tiers sit in the sublimation printers collection. Before you pick a tier, though, settle the toner-versus-inkjet question, because it decides more about your day-to-day than print width or page speed ever will.

Toner or ink: the choice that decides your maintenance

A sublimation printer is a machine built — or factory-converted — to carry disperse dye instead of the pigment or dye-based ink an office printer uses. The dye is formulated to turn to gas under heat rather than dry as a visible film, which is why a sublimation print looks flat and washed out on the paper and only reaches full color once it has been pressed. A standard office inkjet cannot do this. Filling one with sublimation ink clogs it, voids it, or both, depending on the head design, and no driver setting changes that.

Almost all desktop sublimation printers are inkjets, and inkjets carry a known cost that nobody mentions in the sales copy. Liquid disperse dye has to travel through fine nozzles. Leave the machine a couple of weeks between jobs and the dye dries in those nozzles: you get banding, missing colors, a failed nozzle check, and then a cleaning cycle that spends ink to clear it. For a shop printing every day this is a minor tax. For a shop that sublimates in bursts — a school order in March, nothing until June — it is the reason the printer is dead when you need it.

The alternative is a laser dye-sublimation printer, which uses dry sublimation toner and a fuser rather than liquid ink and nozzles. There is no liquid to dry, no printhead to clog and no nozzle to lose. In this catalog that machine is the UNINET iColor 350 Digital Laser Dye Sublimation Printer at $1,495. UNINET states plainly that it is toner rather than ink, so there are no clogged heads, no missing nozzles and no refill bottles. That is the single most useful thing to understand about this category, and it is the reason the 350 is the machine we would point most working shops toward.

None of that makes toner automatically correct. A laser machine costs more up front than a budget inkjet, and its consumable model is different — cartridges rather than bottles. What it buys you is a printer that behaves the same on the day you switch it on after a quiet month as it did the day you installed it. Weigh that against how often you actually print.

Tier one, trying it out: Sublime DS170, $399

If you are not yet sure sublimation is the right process for your products, the cheapest way to find out is the Clearance Sublime DS170 Sublimation Printer at $399, with one unit in stock at the time of writing. At that price you are buying an answer to a question — will these blanks, this artwork and this market work for me — rather than a machine to build a business on.

Treat it accordingly. Buy a small batch of blanks, press them, wash them, and see whether the color and the durability satisfy you before you scale up. Consumables and spares for it sit in the Sublime DS170 and DS170 accessories ranges, including a replacement maintenance tank at $28.83. You will also need ink from the sublimation ink range and paper from the sublimation paper range to run it.

One honest caveat: a clearance unit at this price is a proving tool. If sublimation turns out to be central to your business, plan on the next tier rather than on stretching this one.

Tier two, a working desktop shop: UNINET iColor 350, $1,495

This is the machine most shops should be looking at. The UNINET iColor 350 Digital Laser Dye Sublimation Printer at $1,495 is a desktop dye-sublimation printer that works from toner rather than ink, which is what removes the maintenance problem described above.

The manufacturer's own claims, which are worth citing as claims rather than as measurements we have taken ourselves:

• UNINET rates the machine at print speeds up to 25 pages per minute.
• UNINET states it is up to 40 times faster than inkjet sublimation printers, with up to 50% lower operating cost.
• UNINET states a cost of roughly 40 cents per transfer.
• According to the manufacturer it ships with enough toner for about 1,000 transfers.
• UNINET states it works with standard copy paper, with no specialty transfer paper required.
• It splits and tiles oversize images without additional software, according to UNINET.
• UNINET states that sublimated apparel is suitable for up to 150 wash cycles.

We have not independently verified those figures, and you should treat the wash-cycle and cost-per-transfer numbers as manufacturer claims measured under manufacturer conditions. The copy-paper claim in particular is worth testing against your own results on your own blanks before you plan a costing around it.

Two things a budget needs to account for, and neither is buried fine print. First, on the $1,495 listing the dye-sublimation toner cartridges are purchased separately: the iColor 350 Dye Sublimation Toner Cartridges are $279, the iColor 350 Waste Toner Bottle is $39, and the UNINET iColor Sublimation Toner Cleaner is $19. Budget the printer at $1,495 plus toner, not at $1,495 flat. Second, with ProRIP software the iColor 350 works in CMYK mode only. For photographic work on white and light poly that is exactly what you want; if you were expecting an opaque white channel from this machine, you want the white-toner route further down instead.

Tier three, large-format production: Mimaki TS330-1600

Wide-format sublimation is a different business from desktop work. Instead of pressing individual blanks you print continuous transfer rolls and press cut-and-sew panels, full-front apparel, soft signage and fabric graphics. The machine for that in this catalog is the Mimaki TS330-1600 64 in Sublimation Printer, priced from $27,494.50 to $47,504.60 depending on configuration.

At that level the printer is only part of the outlay. A TS330-1600 10 kg bulk ink upgrade is $7,034.50 and a mini jumbo roll is $20,010.10, and you will need a large-format press or calender to match the width of what you print. This tier only makes sense when you have the order book to keep it fed; financing is available on many machines if the numbers work but the cash does not.

If you are between tiers, buy the smaller machine and outgrow it. A desktop printer that is running flat out is a much better problem than a wide-format machine sitting idle.

The alternative route: UNINET iColor white-toner transfer

Everything above assumes your products are polyester or coated hard goods. If they are not — if you are being asked for cotton tees, black hoodies and bags — no sublimation printer at any price will decorate them, and the answer is a different technology rather than a different budget.

White-toner laser transfer prints CMYK plus an opaque white layer, so the white becomes an under-base. That single difference removes both of sublimation's limits: 100% cotton, black shirts, bags and a long list of hard surfaces, from one machine, with no cutting or weeding. This is the alternative route, not a substitute for a sublimation printer — pick it because your fabrics demand it, not because of anything sublimation cannot be bought here.

The heat transfer laser printers and wider UNINET printers ranges cover it. The iColor 560 Starter Package at $3,295 is the usual entry point for white-toner work; the iColor 560 with ProRIP and SmartCUT is $3,195, and the iColor 560 plus Geo Knight DK14S press package at $4,195 bundles the press you need anyway. For larger format and higher duty cycle, step up to the iColor 650 Starter Package at $6,995 or the iColor 650 LED Laser Transfer Printer at $7,495.

There is a bridge between the two routes worth knowing about: some iColor machines can be loaded with dye-sublimation toner instead of white toner. Fit the iColor 650 Dye Sublimation Toner & Drum Cartridges at $229 and that printer runs true sublimation onto polyester and coated hard goods. Check the model before you buy, because these kits are model-specific. In our catalog they cover the iColor 350, 500, 540/550, 600 and 650 — there is no dye-sublimation toner kit for the iColor 560. So if you want one machine that does both white-toner work and sublimation, the machine to buy is the iColor 650 Starter Package at $6,995, not a 560. The other kits fit earlier models: the iColor 350 Dye Sublimation Toner Cartridges at $279 and the iColor 540/550 Dye Sublimation Toner Cartridges at $349; see the full ink and toner range for what fits your model.

Two machines, two jobs, and it is worth being clear about which is which. If your work is drinkware, aluminum panels, mouse pads and light polyester apparel, buy from the sublimation printer range and spend the difference on blanks and a better press. If cotton and dark garments are most of your order book, buy white toner. If you genuinely do both, the iColor 650 is the machine that switches between them.

A heat press — required either way

No press, no print. Sublimation needs firm, even pressure and stable heat held for the full dwell, which rules out a household iron. A flat clamshell or swing-away handles apparel and flat panels; mugs and tumblers need a dedicated mug press with a curved element. Browse the heat presses range, and if this is your first one, read the heat press buying guide first — platen size and pressure mechanism matter more than brand.

For a desktop sublimation setup, the two presses that cover the most ground are the EnduraPRESS CS15 clamshell at $407.97 for apparel and flat panels and the EnduraPRESS MP5 mug press at $225.17 for drinkware. Buying both from the start is a reasonable call if mugs and tumblers are part of your plan, because a flat press will not do them.

Sublimation vs. white toner vs. HTV

All three are valid businesses; they fail in different places, which is what the table is for. For a fuller side-by-side including direct-to-film, see DTF vs. sublimation vs. HTV.

Real products and prices

Prices are current as of publication and subject to change.

What it costs to start

The figures below are examples built only from catalog products, not fixed packages. Your own configuration will differ, and you should price your own blank mix before committing.

Example A — a complete laser sublimation setup, everything from one order. This is a working desktop shop bought in a single pass: printer, toner, press, paper and a blank to test on.

That is a complete example setup rather than a quoted package. Note the toner line: on the $1,495 iColor 350 listing the dye-sublimation cartridges are bought separately, which is why they appear as their own item. Add the iColor Sublimation Toner Cleaner at $19.00 for routine upkeep, and an EnduraPRESS MP5 mug press at $225.17 if drinkware is in your product mix, since a flat press will not do mugs. UNINET states the machine works with standard copy paper, so treat the transfer paper here as a comparison point rather than a fixed requirement. Remember that with ProRIP the 350 runs CMYK only.

Example B — the cheapest way to prove the process. A Clearance Sublime DS170 at $399, an EnduraPRESS CS15 clamshell at $407.97, a pack of TruePix Classic transfer paper at $25.95 and a blank mouse pad at $19.95 comes to $852.87, plus ink from the sublimation ink range. One DS170 was in stock at the time of writing. This is a test rig, not a production line — go in expecting to answer a question rather than to fill orders.

Example C — one machine for cotton and darks. The iColor 560 with Geo Knight DK14S press package at $4,195 covers printer and press together. Add AquaClear 1-Step transfer paper at $78.95 for 25 sheets and the White Toner Beginner's Notebook at $31.95 for $4,305.90. If you want sublimation out of the same printer as well, step up to the iColor 650 Starter Package at $6,995 instead — that is the model with a dye-sublimation toner kit, at $229.

Frequently asked questions

Can you sublimate on cotton?

Not directly. Sublimation dye bonds to polyester and polymer coatings; cotton has neither, so the image washes out. The workable route is sublimating onto Siser EasySubli or SubliDARK film and pressing that carrier onto the garment. If cotton is the bulk of your work, white toner or HTV is the better fit.

Can you sublimate on dark shirts?

No. Sublimation ink is translucent and there is no white ink, so the garment color shows through and a dark shirt swallows the image entirely. Use a white printable carrier film, or use a process with an opaque white under-base such as a white-toner laser transfer printer.

Do I need a special printer for sublimation?

Yes. Sublimation requires disperse dye, which a standard office printer cannot handle. You need a machine built for it, and there are three tiers in the sublimation printers range: the clearance Sublime DS170 at $399, the laser UNINET iColor 350 at $1,495, and the large-format Mimaki TS330-1600 from $27,494.50. A UNINET iColor model with a dye-sublimation toner kit, such as the iColor 650, is a fourth route if you also need white toner.

Is a laser sublimation printer better than an inkjet one?

It is better at the thing that most often goes wrong. Inkjet sublimation printers push liquid dye through fine nozzles, and those nozzles clog when the machine sits unused, which costs you cleaning cycles, wasted ink and failed prints. A laser dye-sublimation printer such as the iColor 350 uses dry toner, so there is no printhead to clog. UNINET also states it is up to 40 times faster than inkjet sublimation printers with up to 50% lower operating cost, though those are the manufacturer's figures rather than ours. The trade-off is a higher entry price and a cartridge-based consumable model.

What is the best sublimation printer for beginners?

If you are still testing the water and want the lowest possible outlay, the clearance Sublime DS170 at $399 answers the question cheaply. If you already know sublimation fits your products and you want a machine that will still work after a quiet month, start at the UNINET iColor 350 at $1,495 and budget the toner separately. Either way, spend real money on the press and on a proper color profile rather than on print speed — that is where a first month usually goes wrong. And if cotton or dark garments are in the mix at all, read the white-toner section before you buy anything.

How much does the iColor 350 cost to run?

UNINET states roughly 40 cents per transfer and says the printer ships with enough toner for about 1,000 transfers. Those are manufacturer figures and we have not verified them independently. What you can plan around from the catalog is the replacement consumable pricing: dye-sublimation toner cartridges at $279, a waste toner bottle at $39, and toner cleaner at $19. Add blanks, which are usually the largest per-piece cost in sublimation.

Sublimation vs. HTV: what is the difference?

Sublimation dyes the material itself and leaves no hand-feel, but is limited to light polyester and coated hard goods. HTV is an opaque film cut and pressed onto the surface, so it works on nearly any fabric in any color, but you can feel it and each extra color means another cut-and-press layer. Sublimation suits photographic work on the right substrate; HTV suits bold, few-color designs on anything.

Is sublimation permanent?

On the correct substrate, yes — this is its strongest argument. The dye ends up inside the polymer rather than as a layer sitting on top of it, so unlike vinyl or a printed transfer there is no layer there to crack or peel away. It will fade under prolonged UV exposure, which matters outdoors but rarely for apparel or drinkware. On the wrong substrate it is not permanent at all, which is why substrate choice does all the work. UNINET states that apparel sublimated with the iColor 350 is suitable for up to 150 wash cycles; test your own blanks and washing instructions rather than relying on a single number.

What heat press settings does sublimation need?

Follow the instructions supplied with the specific paper, ink and blank you are using rather than a number from a blog. Time, temperature and pressure vary by substrate, by blank manufacturer and by press, and mug, metal and apparel settings all differ. Press one test piece from every new batch of blanks and record what worked.

Where to go next

If you are buying your first machine, compare the three tiers side by side in sublimation printers and be honest about how often you will actually print — that is what decides between a budget inkjet and the laser iColor 350. Then pick your substrates from the sublimation blanks range, stock sublimation paper and sublimation ink to match, and put a press in the order from the heat presses range, because nothing prints without one. If cotton and dark garments are a real part of your work, add Siser EasySubli or compare the systems in heat transfer laser printers. Signwarehouse has supplied the sign and garment trade since 1963, and we would rather point you at the process that fits your work than the one with the bigger ticket.