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.
There really arent many limitations depending on what machine you have. If you have a brother then you would be limited to lights and what ever the printbed size is. Like with my machine the only limitation I have is that my printbed size is 13 x 22 so I am limited to prints of that size. I dont really have any other limits as my machine prints on darks and lights. One thing is that it is not economical to print large runs on darks as the inks are quite expensive and you get to a point where there is not too much profit if the orders are large and you are giving price breaks for so many items. Those are the only real limitations with dtg.
Also what is really nice with dtg is that you have unlimited colors and detail with its printing.
Hope this helps some
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Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ~~~Mark Twain BobbieLee
Absolutely, most are made now to be able to print white. The brother I think is the only popular one out there that cant print white ink. I have the DTG HM1 and love it, it prints lights or darks (has white ink).
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Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ~~~Mark Twain BobbieLee
If you are a printer the cost for the ink in printing one shirt would be around $3 to $$3.50 plus the cost of the shirt and pretreatment, I think other than the cost of ink the most of the cost is the labor because the design needs to be set up on your computer, you have to pretreat the shirt and then print it and cure the ink. So there are quite a few steps in printing a dark shirt. I think the best size of job to do with dark shirts is around 30 to 40 shirts. If it were me that would be the perfect size job That cost I listed would be for a shirt with a approx. 12" x 10" design irregardless of the amount of colors.
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Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ~~~Mark Twain BobbieLee
Currently another limitation is printing on polyester.
Direct to garment printing is a great advancement in imprinting technology and a wonderful tool. Combining DTG with other forms of imprinting like Screen Printing, Transfers , Embroidery etc.. will decrease any limitations you may have when sticking to one imprinting method and give you the ability to imprint virtually anything.
Rod
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Rod DirectDigitalSupply.com - DuPont Inks, Printer Parts, Cartridges and much more!
Last edited by DirectSupply; May 2nd, 2008 at 05:24 PM.
Thanks Rod, I totally forgot about the poly issue printing on poly does not work well, the higher the content of poly the duller the image will look as polyester does not absorb the ink the way a natural fiber does. 90/10 and 80/20 will still look great but when you get into 50/50 sometimes it is hit and miss on what your results will look like. Also the higher poly content the less washablitiy.
Thanks again Rod for pointing that out
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Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest. ~~~Mark Twain BobbieLee
Limitations? 
