Need to Register?

hawrai · May 16th, 2009

I think I may have made a very expensive mistake getting the Anajet. We have our own clothes label and my intention was to do our printing in-house - make our own small run designs etc. But after practicing for 4 weeks with the Anajet
I have come to the conclusion that this machine (and any other DTG printer) is for hobbyists, and people wanting one offs of their own designs who know what they are getting.

There is just too many variables that can go wrong to offer to general public as branded tees.

It seems that even on white tees, to get a decent print you still need to pre treat, I have finally mastered how to pre-treat without getting a stain only to find that the garment feels stiff due to the amount of pre-treat, I finally put less pre-treat so garment feels relatively soft, only to realise that our automatic heat press leaves a cheap nasty square mark around the image due to pressure (set to lowest the press can handle)...Now I'm debating whether to AGAIN spend money and get a dryer to eliminate the markings the heat press makes, or will I get more issues such as wash fastness and hit and miss accuracy that a dryer might cause.

Also I found that any white underbase you print over looks bad after one wash - unless you tick " content based"

To top it all, my other concern has been the safety of pre-treat with regards to health...Although I use the spray booth, I still need to use press, which gives off fumes from the dried pre-treat...this cannot be good for you.

My fault for not really researching more, but a warning to anyone thinking of getting these DTG, they will not IMO replace sending artwork to traditional screen printer, if you intend to sell tees in boutiques.

mrbigjack50 · May 16th, 2009

believe me my firend, I had an Anajet for a year and was biggest hunk of crap I ever dealt with in my life, white ink on machine was a joke, price wise/quality wise.
I traded my machine for a Brother and it is an amazing machine, cost a bit more money bt perfect prints every time and zero hasseling.

All trainging in the world won't make Anajet a good printer, software is junk, ink carts. are junk, and any(one) that says that machine is decsent say that because they wanna make themselves feel better for spending 15 grand on a machine that worth 2 grand

As for you last qoute, not true Brother printer is amazing machine, look into it, you wont be sorry I promise, sure you can;t do dark garments but why bother?
$4 in ink cost alone tss give me a break

TPBaker · May 17th, 2009

I won't deny the Brother is a great machine, for lights only to me the Anajet and Brother are neck and neck. If I were ONLY doing lights, I might have bought the Brother, but I am NOT only doing lights. We are having no problems whatsoever doing darks. Yes we had some bumps on the learning curve, but now no problems. AND I am not trying to make myself feel better for buying one. If something goes awry and I discover I am wrong I will admit it here. Just like spelling and proper grammar is not for everyone, neither is becoming a garment manufacturer. There is a difference between having good art and a clothing label and having good art, handling the technical side of taking art, then producing the product, and then having a clothing line and selling the product. btw we are doing mass quantities and one offs. The ability to do custom one-offs CAN be a GREAT money maker for you.

mrbigjack50 · May 17th, 2009

I can't honestly see for lights them being in same arena ... Brother by far prints better lights than Anajet, just ask oh, all my clients that question when they compared prints off Anajet and Brother.
As a machine stand point Brother is built to run constantly were Anajet as Justin posted images of, is a printer made of a home printer, using consumer heads to print with.

I will keep at that, but I just hope you know what your ink costs are adding up to be when doing dark garments in a "mass quantity" bases, because ink cost alone is $4/$5 and pretreatment is another 50 cents

zoom_monster · May 17th, 2009

Hawrai,
It's sad to to see you frustrated. I will say that I offer Screening, Direct to garment and embroidery to my customers. I'm well aware of the limitations of CMYK and for this reason alone I need to make sure that the expectations of the client meet the limitations of the process. You may very well have chosen the wrong process, epecially if you do spot colors and you are selling wholsale. DTG printers are slow and expensive when compared to screenprinting larger quantities. Screening is slow and expensive on small quantities with more than a couple colors. I got into the Anajet 2 years ago because there was a whole segment of people that I had to turn away with screening. I did see your post on the banding. The key here is check your nozzle pattern. If the pattern is full, you will not get banding. If banding appears later in a run or after you have been printing a while, humidity is most likely too low in your print area. This is true in all colors and perhaps more so in white. if you are looking for a totally opaque "bulletproof" look of screening, you have to go with plastisol. My clients really appreciate the softer feel and the fact that the ink never cracks after a year of washes.
Variables... there are variables in any process. In my oppinion, there are less with my Anajet because I get instant feedback, where with screening and embroidery you are further removed from the results. 4 weeks really is not enough time to fully get a handle on all this. Seriously, you'll learn new tricks every day. You'll get a batch of shirts from one source and you will have to adjust. You just have to recognize all the info thats being presented to you.
Safety, Yes the the pretreatment does have Formaldahide. You really do not want to be printing infant clothing with it and make sure your pretreatment area is properly equiped to keep you and your clients safe. There is a white paper on the Anajet site regarding this, as well as the MSDS sheets.
Ultimately the Anajet is great at what it does. It's full capable of providing commecially viable product at a sellable price. The process is not the best solution in all cases, but no process is.

Ian

zoom_monster · May 17th, 2009

Sean, I like the Brother, but in my experience you are wrong about the Anajet. I hear the bit and moan from you and I just do not get how it got to that point. I'm fine if you want to warn people of the perils of white printing, but to put it on a machine is not productive, because it does work for those who choose to work with it. A new guy comes in here looking for help or venting and you just badmouth? Solutions are what people want. I help people in many forums here and I've seen you do this also. I too have had bad experiences with some companies in this forum, but you will not find me talking trash. Please, let's be nice

PS. I do not discount your oppinion. Let's understand why we are here.

mrbigjack50 · May 17th, 2009

I try not to moan but my allegations are not some sorta of buyer regret plot be wound up about this particular brand of machine, everything I ever said about is was 100 percent true.
Yes I did have hardships with my machine but not wants was most of this issues I argued about was at my fault but fault of maker of machine : )

I ain't trying to push in the disapointment to the poor guy, because I went through the same battle.
I can't sugar coat things I guess, like some people on forum, I gonna give the person the upfront truth about a machine because I hate to see them go under because I wasn't upfront about issues to watch out for.

Maybe best thing I can say is this, look at Anajet thread, and see all the threads in it and what do people say about machine? What do majority of the people say about machine? Ya now, look at Brother thread and how machine complains do you head about, " my machine sucks, my machine don't work at all, Help"

Ya point made : )

I do many seem like I am somebody who just joined forum to carry rants, I joined to help people best I can, and I got people calling me for advice all the time : )
I understand where you are coming from, and notice you are very helpful here all the time, but I not gonna tell someone " hang in there, it will get better" when I know truth is that it won't..

If something is not made properly than there isn't a magic wound to make it better, and Anajet told me themselves, there machine still has lots of bugs with white ink and why they kept making new version of the white ink.ie version 1 2 3 ect.

europrint · May 17th, 2009

Your experiences are scary. I will do much more research before committing. The Brother machine seems to have a proper print company behind it -so they may be developing at the machine and ink ends to deliver the right solutions.

I intend to offer embroidery too -so I will put my critic hat on for that too.

I feel for you - you sound a very good trier. keep us informed if you make any breakthroughs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hawrai


	I think I may have made a very expensive mistake getting the Anajet. We have our own clothes label and my intention was to do our printing in-house - make our own small run designs etc. But after practicing for 4 weeks with the Anajet I have come to the conclusion that this machine (and any other DTG printer) is for hobbyists, and people wanting one offs of their own designs who know what they are getting. There is just too many variables that can go wrong to offer to general public as branded tees. It seems that even on white tees, to get a decent print you still need to pre treat, I have finally mastered how to pre-treat without getting a stain only to find that the garment feels stiff due to the amount of pre-treat, I finally put less pre-treat so garment feels relatively soft, only to realise that our automatic heat press leaves a cheap nasty square mark around the image due to pressure (set to lowest the press can handle)...Now I'm debating whether to AGAIN spend money and get a dryer to eliminate the markings the heat press makes, or will I get more issues such as wash fastness and hit and miss accuracy that a dryer might cause. Also I found that any white underbase you print over looks bad after one wash - unless you tick " content based" To top it all, my other concern has been the safety of pre-treat with regards to health...Although I use the spray booth, I still need to use press, which gives off fumes from the dried pre-treat...this cannot be good for you. My fault for not really researching more, but a warning to anyone thinking of getting these DTG, they will not IMO replace sending artwork to traditional screen printer, if you intend to sell tees in boutiques.

hawrai · May 17th, 2009

Thank you all for the info ...latest drama...some t-shirts after 1st wash have slight fade appearing ALREADY (on white tees only).

Also..now I am realizing just how quickly am going through a bottle of pre-treat - since I am pre-treating whites also, to get acceptable bright colours! this is going to be expensive i fear!

Dark garments - prints looking much better after more experimenting with pre-treat application - pretreating 60/40 pre-treat/distilled water, then using brush to spread, washes well after 1 wash ( am trying multiple washes now) - however, still have problem with heatpress leaving "pressed mark". As I am only experimenting, I am blending the mark by ironing it into rest of garment LOL! works ok for one offs, but hate to do this once we make designs for our shop!

With regards to the Brother machine, I did think about getting this, as the seller had this machine also, but the demo printout he produced, the colours looked washed out and not very bright - he did a print on Anajet white tee, the Anajet seemed more brighter, but now after experimenting myself, it seems they had pre-treated the white shirt before printing on the Anajet...But from what I saw of the two, I thought since the Anajet had more vibrant colours on white tee, AND it can print on dark, why not go for it.

mrbigjack50 · May 17th, 2009

If it fading after first wash, you prob. did heat set it long enough, Anajet says to do for 37 sec but I always did for a Minute, iron mark usually goes away when kools off, you may wanna lower heat slightly and use a teflon thingy to protect garment.

Just know how much it is costing you to do the dark garments, and as for colors looking brighter, well its a trues and false thing, I will admit that photo's looked brighter on Anajet but that's about it

Graphix's, especially anything with black look superior with Brother compared to Anajet
I also find that Brother print wash far better than Anajet ( dupont inks)
I just find the Brother to be a far more reliable machine and there has been zero maintenance basically so far, with over 1700 prints in a month time

As for pretreatment, you don't use one for dark's on light color garments to make them pop more, there art special ones made for light colored garments but I never have bothered because more time consuming and clients have been extremely pleased with results I been getting for them so far.

I have had great results with Anvil 976 and the Gildan 2000 for printing/washing, hanes are junk in my opinion because fibers pull out to easy and jerzees have same issue with fibers tending to pull out

TPBaker · May 17th, 2009

Thats wierd, I have never pretreated whites. Have you tried printing on lights using light drop size with a level 5 ink? That should give you incredible color. Do you wash your test print right after printing and curing? That will not give you an accurate representation. I would think if the humidity stays constant from printing to wash in the 50% and up range in a short period of time say a couple of hours that the test may not be real world. I would try hanging the shirt overnight in an area with less than 40% humidity overnight, then washing the shirt. I'm sure someone will try to discredit my thoughts, but the inks are waterbased.

hawrai · May 17th, 2009

Hmm, very interesting. yes I am at present washing straight after curing - within hour. Also I will try the ink settings you suggest. Thank You

raise · May 17th, 2009

We pretreat for lights using FastColor rom Equipment Zone. We used to do it for every garment but scaled the usage back to premium product only. It was more a time cost than a monetary cost.

The FastColor product is not the same as the pretreatment for dark garments. As I understand it many Brother owners use it as well to get a more vibrant print from the GT-541.

zoom_monster · May 17th, 2009

Hawrai, Who told you to use pretreat on white shirts? The pretreatment for dark shirts is designed to gell the ink fast so it sits on top not penetrate. what's good for white ink probably is not good for white. When you print white ink, you can usually touch it within seconds and it's almost dry. Never tried the pretreatment (EZ) for white shirts. The fading you see on white shirts is defibilation, as Sean explained, certain shirts are better in this regard. basically long fibers, lay down and are coated on one side. once washed, they stand up muting the color. Smooth shirts print much better. This is a problem in screenprinting, especially where you are trying to put down a very thin coating of ink. One of these days, I may try a pretreatment for white, but i've had great results without.
In a good example of how the substrate effects gamut and saturation, try this: get a piece of photo paper, set the Rip to print on the smallest dot level one. use a chart like DA's multirip test chart and print on the photo paper, a piece of regular copy paper and a t-shirt. This example also shows that you have to strike a balance. You can use larger dot size, or increase the level... putting down more ink, but you might pay in getting a compressed gamut and a slower printspeed.

Hawrai, have you done training yet?

hawrai · May 18th, 2009

The rep gave me training when he came to install the printer. I live in UK. He was the one that mentioned if I wanted brighter colours on white tee, to use the pre-treat. Our garments will be fashion retail, so I have to use pre-treat on white to get the quality we need to sell at.

Back to my initial question, is conveyor drier as good as using heat press? - desperately need to eliminate markings caused by heat pressing.

Need to Register?

Resources

T-Shirt Sites

I'm fighting a loosing battle - my thoughts as a new DTG owner