A heat press is a machine engineered to imprint a design or graphic on a substrate, such as a t-shirt, with the application of heat and pressure for a preset time period. While heat presses are often used to apply designs to fabrics, specially designed presses can also be used to imprint designs on mugs, plates, jigsaw puzzles, caps, and other products. Both manual and automatic heat presses are widely available. Most heat presses currently on the market use an aluminum upper-heating element with a heat rod cast into the aluminum or a heating wire attached to the element. For high-volume operations involving the continuous imprinting of items, automatic shuttle and dual platen transfer presses are used. The substrates to be imprinted are continuously loaded onto the lower platen and shuttled under the heat platen, which then applies the necessary heat and pressure.
Visit Kornit Digital to learn why direct-to-garment printing eliminates the need for a heat press, and why that’s a benefit for your print process.