Water Base Ink
Water-based inks are a good choice when a “soft hand” is desirable. A soft hand is the condition where the ink film cannot easily be felt with the hand when passed across the surface of the fabric. This affect is often used as an argument for why water-based is preferable to plastisol as plastisol has more of a hand than water-based.
Water-based ink also has the advantage of being an excellent ink system for high speed roll-to-roll yardage printing. Such printing is done on large sophisticated equipment that has very large drying (curing) capacity.Water-based ink also is a good choice where ink penetration is desirable, such as in towel printing. Towels have a high nap fabric that must be printed in a manner where the ink penetrates or wicks through to the base fabric for adequate coverage. Waterbased inks that are designed to wick into the fabric are excellent for this application. Ink wicking is not a desirable affect in most other fabric printing as it will destroy the design and registration of multiple colors.
(Source: http://www.pneac.org/sheets/screen/plastisolvwaterbase.pdf)
