The only machine that combines the unlimited colour depth and design freedom of digital inkjet printing with the special-effects capability and paste volume of flat-bed screen printing — in a single, inline production line.
The Hybrid is not locked into a single production method. Switch between three modes depending on the job — without changing machines, without moving fabric to a second line.
Digital printing alone is exceptional at colour and detail — but it has a hard limit: it cannot apply special-effect pastes. Gold, silver, foil binder, glitter, puff, discharge, and khadi textures all require the physical paste volume that only a screen printing station can deliver. A digital printer head simply cannot do it.
Flat-bed printing alone handles those effects perfectly — but it cannot replicate the photographic colour resolution of digital. And printing large solid background areas on a digital machine is costly: the ink consumption per square metre on a solid fill is significantly higher than applying the same colour by screen.
The Hybrid eliminates both limitations in a single machine. The result is a product that neither a pure digital line nor a pure flat-bed line can produce — at a cost structure that neither machine alone can match.
Apply metallic pastes, foil binders, glitter, and khadi effects directly onto digitally printed fabric in the same production pass. These effects are impossible on a digital-only machine — and previously required a second, separate printing run.
Large solid background areas are printed using flat-bed screens, delivering better colour depth, superior levelling, and significantly lower cost per square metre than printing the same coverage digitally. Digital handles the design detail on top.
Printing a dense solid ground digitally is expensive — ink consumption on a full-coverage fill is disproportionately high. Using flat-bed for the background and digital for the detail produces the same result at a fraction of the digital ink cost.
Digitally printed fabric with screen-applied special effects commands a significantly higher market price than either process alone. The Hybrid is specifically designed to produce this premium category of fabric in a single inline pass.
Previously, combining digital and special-effect printing required two separate machines, two separate production runs, and re-registration of the fabric between them. The Hybrid does it inline — eliminating the second run, the second machine, and the registration error between processes.
The Hybrid integrates the Screenotex Altima flat-bed printing section with a digital printing module inline — fabric travels through both sections in a single continuous pass from infeed to outfeed.
Every feature on the Hybrid is engineered around one principle: that combining two printing technologies in a single line must produce a better result than either could achieve separately.
Our engineers will help you design the right configuration — number of screen stations, digital section, dryer, and fabric handling — for your production requirements.