The digital tile press changed the ceramics industry more fundamentally than any technology since the invention of the tunnel kiln. Twenty years ago, a tile design meant a screen-printed roller, expensive to change and limited in colour count. Today, an eight-colour ink-jet head prints unique patterns onto ceramic body at 400 dpi — every tile in a run can be different, or every tile in a run can be perfectly identical, and the design can change without a plant shutdown.
This piece is an engineer's tour through Oreana's digital tile production line — from the raw clay slab to the boxed, shipped, PEI-class-V-rated porcelain tile.
Stage 1 · Body preparation
The tile body is made from a blend of kaolin clay, feldspar, quartz and colouring oxides. Individual ingredients are weighed to within 0.1% tolerance, mixed with water to form a wet slurry (slip), and pumped through a spray-dryer that produces a fine granular powder at approximately 6% moisture — the raw material of every pressed tile.
The granulate is stored in silos and dosed automatically to the press. Consistency here — moisture, particle size distribution, compaction properties — sets the mechanical properties of the final tile.
Stage 2 · Pressing
A hydraulic press applies 4,500 tonnes of force to a die filled with granulate powder. The die shape determines the tile format — 60×60, 60×120, 80×160 or 120×240 cm — and the top surface is a mirror finish so the pressed tile takes a polish-ready surface out of the press.
The pressed but unfired tile is called green ware. It is fragile — roughly the consistency of a hard biscuit — but strong enough to be handled by robotic arms and moved to the drying line.
Stage 3 · Drying
Green tiles enter a horizontal roller dryer at ambient temperature and exit two hours later at 130°C with less than 0.2% residual moisture. This dwell profile is critical: dry too fast and the tile cracks; dry too slow and the tile production line stalls. Modern dryers use recovered kiln heat to reduce energy consumption dramatically.
Stage 4 · Engobe and glaze application
An engobe — a white base coating — is airbrushed onto the tile surface. This gives the ink-jet the clean white canvas it needs to print vivid colours. On top of the engobe, an unfired glaze is applied — either a transparent gloss for polished-look tiles, a matte silica-rich glaze for structured surfaces, or specialty glazes for slip-resistant R11 or R13 finishes.
Stage 5 · Ink-jet printing
This is where the magic happens. Eight print heads — cyan, magenta, yellow, black plus four spot colours — traverse the tile line, printing pigment onto the engobed surface at 400 dpi. Each print head contains 512 individual piezoelectric nozzles firing pigment droplets in the 12–14 picoliter range.
The pattern comes from a raster image file — typically a 25,000 × 25,000 pixel scan of the natural stone or texture being reproduced. Modern presses can print unique patterns tile-by-tile from a variation library (so a natural-stone-look installation doesn't repeat every fifth tile), or perfectly identical patterns for high-consistency commercial applications.
Stage 6 · Firing
Printed tiles enter a horizontal roller kiln — up to 180 metres long — where they are heated to 1,220°C over roughly 45 minutes, held at peak temperature for six minutes, then cooled to ambient over the next 45 minutes. This sinters the body, vitrifies the glaze, and locks the pigment onto the surface. The tile emerges as porcelain: dense, hard, and — critically — chemically inert.
The firing curve is precisely controlled to prevent cracking, warping, and colour shift. A poorly-fired tile shows visible edge-warp; a well-fired tile is dead-flat within 0.5 mm across a 120 cm span.
Stage 7 · Lapping (polishing)
For polished-finish tiles, the fired tile passes through a lapping line — a sequence of diamond grinding wheels moving from coarse to fine, terminating with polishing pads that produce a mirror gloss. The pigmentation, having penetrated the glaze during firing, is stable — polishing does not remove or alter the printed pattern.
Matte-finish tiles skip this stage. Structured (embossed) finishes involve a small extra step where a pattern-rolling wheel imprints texture into the wet glaze before firing.
Stage 8 · Rectification
Modern large-format tiles are rectified — trimmed on all four edges with diamond wheels to produce perfectly square, dimensionally consistent tiles. This allows the minimal grout lines (1.5 mm) that give large-format installations their monolithic look.
Stage 9 · QC and packing
Every tile passes under a machine-vision quality station that captures a high-resolution image of the surface, checks for print defects, edge damage and colour deviation, and rejects any tile that fails the tolerance envelope. Accepted tiles are graded by shade code (a subtle indexing of colour variation), stacked with foam interleaves, and boxed for shipping.
What this means for specifiers
Digital printing dramatically expands the design vocabulary available to architects. Marble-look, stone-look, wood-look, concrete-look, geometric, fabric, custom — anything that can be photographed or drawn can be printed onto porcelain and installed with the durability of ceramic. In many cases, digital-printed tile is a better outdoor and floor material than the natural material it emulates.
The trade-offs to understand: digital tile is not natural stone, and a discerning designer will see the difference under close examination. The best applications are those where scale, cost, durability or hygiene requirements make natural stone impractical — floors in commercial spaces, exterior facades, pool decks, hospital corridors — or where the aesthetic language of the space calls for a graphic, pattern-driven surface that only digital printing can provide.
Custom-printed projects
Oreana welcomes custom-print orders from architects working on hospitality, retail and corporate projects. Minimum order is typically 200 m². Send us your file (25,000 × 25,000 pixels ideally, 300 dpi flat vector or high-res raster) and we will produce a full-size proof within seven working days. Production time from approved proof is typically four weeks.
If you have a specific pattern in mind — an in-house brand pattern, an artist collaboration, a bespoke stone reproduction — get in touch and we will walk you through what is possible.