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.
How many shirts can you do on your DTG printer an Hour (One Sided-full chest)?
I'm running a t-jet jumbo2
White/Lights- 48 shirts
Darks- 30 shirts
That is pressed and in the box. I would love to see how quick others are printing. see if I'm slow or fast. Thanks for the feed back
I gotta call you on this one. Dupont calls for up to 3 minutes cure time on their white ink, which would translate into at least 90 minutes of cure time for 30 shirts unless you are running multiple heat presses. Same goes for the color inks, they recommend in the area of 2 minutes to cure a light garment, again 2 x 48 is more than an hour. Any chance of getting a video up of maybe 10 minutes of this production? Those numbers are faster than even the $200K Kornit and any of the Epsons. I might buy 20 per hour, but still think that is pushing it for one operator, especially when you have to pre-treat and press the shirts prior to printing.
Mathematically, based on a 1440 x 1440 underbase and a 1440 x 720 or 720 x 720 color pass, it should take 3 times as long to print a dark shirt (or shirts on the Jumbo 2) as it does to print a single pass light garment. Assuming your 48 light shirt number is correct (which sounds close to me) - then you should be producing no more than 16 dark shirts per hour.
What all are you calculating into your equation - pre-treating and pre-pressing? RIP time, is this for the same image? How many operators and how many heat presses?
Even on my blazer I don't anywhere close to that. I did some 9"x12" color prints on black shirts and the best I can do, (and maintain high quality prints), is 5, maybe 6 shirts per hour if I hussle. Now that's printing at 1440 underbase and 720 top coat. It use to take longer to print but I got some tips from other users and cut my printing down a bit.
On our Flexi L printing on lights only ( no white ink) we can print 45 shirts per hour on a good day- curing 55-60 seconds with dtginks-- at 350 on the heat press.
On a smaller print we have printed 90 tote bags an hour- printing 4 per pass, and curing more than one at a time on the heat press at higher heat for 20 seconds ( with R & H- and yes they washed fine- though they were not intended to be washed).
What all are you calculating into your equation - pre-treating (yes) and pre-pressing (yes)? RIP time (process about 8 jobs at a time the mach. never stops-6min max), is this for the same image(yes, but doesn't matter)? How many operators (2) and how many heat presses (1)?
On our Flexi L printing on lights only ( no white ink) we can print 45 shirts per hour on a good day- curing 55-60 seconds with dtginks-- at 350 on the heat press.
On a smaller print we have printed 90 tote bags an hour- printing 4 per pass, and curing more than one at a time on the heat press at higher heat for 20 seconds ( with R & H- and yes they washed fine- though they were not intended to be washed).
This is one operator, one heat press, one Flexi L printing two shirts ( 4 tote bags) per pass. It can actually print four shirts per pass but we found it didn't save much time on full front prints as we had to wait for the press. Timed from the box back into the box including ripping one design and setting up a production run. Printing dual cmyk 360 by 360. No prepress, not needed on these runs we timed.
What ink do you use JM with the high temp short cure time?
Those are really impressive numbers. I am not sure if the average shop can do them, but that is more of a props to your team. 400 degrees on a cotton shirt is higher than what almost any shops do. You almost press your shirts like most sublimation transfers (just need to extend the time a little longer). It would be interesting to see what others get for a wash test at that time / temperature.
ok, I also run a T-Jet Jumbo 2. My last job on black shirts 11.5 X 14.5, 1440 underbase 720 color pass, ran 12-14 shirts an hour in the box.
Pre-treating is not a seperate time as you can pre-treat while you are printing.
White or light color shirts 360 2 pass 48 shirts per hour. 720 1 pass with cmyk ink levels bumped a bit to still get a vibrant print you can push 60 an hour since you are eliminating that extra bed reset.
I cure white shirts at 325 degrees for 90-110 seconds depending on humidity levels and 200-220 seconds on dark shirts.
LC prints on whites of course are close to 120 an hour since you can cure 3 shirts at a time per heat press. Be prepared to run if you are by yourself.
We have done some testing with the "new" bright white in a T-Jet2 this week.
And now we get a perfect coverage of white in 720dpi underbase. We printed a job with a 25*25cm print (almost 10*10 inch) and we did 25 shirts in 55 minutes. Pretreating, printing and curing at the same time. One operator (my best one in the shop) and I was just watching all shirts flying around in the shop *LOL*
Notice that this resolution only worked on our most expensive shirt with really high quality cotton.
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We have done some testing with the "new" bright white in a T-Jet2 this week.
And now we get a perfect coverage of white in 720dpi underbase. We printed a job with a 25*25cm print (almost 10*10 inch) and we did 25 shirts in 55 minutes. Pretreating, printing and curing at the same time. One operator (my best one in the shop) and I was just watching all shirts flying around in the shop *LOL*
Notice that this resolution only worked on our most expensive shirt with really high quality cotton.
I thought the Kiosk and T-Jet2 were very similar. Based on Epson 2200?
There is no way that machine could get through 50 passes in 55 minutes. It took our machine about 3 / 3.5 min to get through a single pass of white or color at 720 dpi.
Based on those numbers, it would take me about 2.5 hours.
Is there some other settings that make your 720 dpi pass faster than ours? I'd love to know to get some speed out of this machine.
If you can't print more than 40 white shirts and hour it wouldn't be worth it at least to me. Unless you are charging over $15.00 a shirt on large orders(25-200).
How many shirts can you DTG print in an hour (full front 1 sided)? 
Re: How many shirts can DTG print in an hour? 
