Discuss the various aspects of direct to garment printing. DTG printers include Brother, T-Jet, Flexi-Jet, DTG Kiosk, Kornit, Mimaki, Tex-Jet and others! Discuss and learn about this up and coming printing technology.
I really like DTG but I've noticed that d-sub has some great features too. You can get into DTG for under $20k, how about d-sub? In particular, what does it cost to do full-shirt prints (equipment and materials)?
Is it practical to use d-sub to print a dark background (on the graphic) if you are doing both sides of a shirt?
Are polyester and cotton t-shirts two fairly disjoint markets?
Thanks. These discussions have been really interesting for me -
Matt
To choose between the 2 methods you will have to decide what is it exactly you are going to do?
Your market? Products? Volumes?
If you want to use cotton t-shirts and full color graphics - go DTG.
If your market is in need of performance wear and full color prints - dye-sub could be an option,
Dye- sub doesn't work on dark fabrics - every design with dark background started as white piece of fabric.
Some DTG printers are comfortable printing on black.
With both methods you have flexibility of one-offs/samples, but for very different markets...
DTG is mainly for textiles, while with dye-sub you can print on variety of things - but all of them got to be polyester coated...
There is a very informative dye-sub section here and the DTG one, I believe, should be very good too.
We have started with Vinyl with the aim to get into DTG as soon as we have the time and money to invest.
We chose Vinyl over sub because it goes onto 100% cotton (so we can use the same t shirts for DTG) and because we can put designs onto any colour t shirts. We will be upgrading our Heat-press soon to one which is suitable for dtg, we are hoping it to be a slower but less risky process than jumping in at the deep end.
Aside from the difference in what materials you can use each process on, there is an enormous price difference between them. You can get an Epson 1400 with a bulk ink dye-sub setup for under $1500. You are looking at at least $12K for a new DTG...
I have both, hardly ever use the dye-sub setup. We don't do dark shirts on the DTG, we've done about 700 light shirts on the Kiosk so far. My vinyl cutter has more than paid for itself already doing heat press vinyl as well as appliques for embroidery.
You really need to decide what your market is and what suits it best, then decide on which equipment to purchase.
Mat, I do have experience with all-over t-shirt printing - what do you want to know?
When it comes to choosing between vinyl and dye-sub, it's like comparing apples and oranges. The applications are quite different. I doubt if full back of a sports shirt covered with full color sponsorship logos is achievable with vinyl. But if most of your orders are black cotton shirts with one-two color prints - having a dye-sub set up would be useless.
My market is mainly sports and active wear, so dye-sub is perfect for me.
Tania,
Does it make sense to make a dark or black background in your graphic, and put THAT on a white shirt, making the shirt have a light (logo etc) on dark style? Saw a demo in which somebody covered both sides of shirt with US flag. Made **** look completely different than a white shirt...
Thanks
Matt
What you are talking is called large format dye sub printing and requires a big printer and a big heat press. That puts you in a different price range than the Epson 1400 bulk feed system that was mentioned above or in another one of your posts. You can even outsource this type of production to a couple of different companies that participate on this forum if you don't want to invest in the equipment. To get into large format dye sub printing, the cost can range in the low $1X,000 to setups that exceed $50,000 depending on the printer, heat press and other items you get.
Start with DTG, or d-sub? 
