I managed to find a quality fabric printer in a famous opera house dyeing -department recently, and was amazed at what it could produce. The quality was really good. It uses the printer to reproduce some of the production materials for costumes, designs, and props. Not sure if it printed onto polyester rolls.
I have a number of photographic images and patterns that could possibly convert to some types of fabric or material, eg scarves, wallcoverings, etc, and wondered if others out there send away their patterns to specialists or have bought a digital fabric printer ? ( I don’t really want iron-on transfers ! )
I expect a fabric-printer would be quite expensive. The one I saw could print various fabrics up to about 3 metres wide, which is far too wide and expensive for my needs, and was a big, industrial machine.
I suspect the best way forward would be to send off some sample patterns to a specialist and review the costs and quality before plunging in to an expensive purchase.
Now you can even buy a computer-based small machine to print chocolate designs of your patterns and images, ( yes, chocolate ! ), and the range of smaller computer-based machines is increasing rapidly and looking very exciting.