Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
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Discuss the various t-shirt fulfillment services in this general fulfillment forum. Newer companies like RedBubble, etc can be discussed in this main forum.
Companies that have been around 2+ years (CafePress.com, Zazzle.com, Spreadshirt.com, PrintMojo.com, PrintFection, etc), may have their own separate subforums below (as demand permits).
Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
I totally agree Rodney, I was going to post close to the same thing. I was going to say that with any of these companies you have a chance of getting a good print or a bad print as they are all pretty much using the same machines, what makes the difference in the print is the operator of that machine. So one day you can have a very detail oriented person running the machine and on your next order you may have someone who is just there to get paid by the hour not really paying attention to how the machine is printing and you will get a not so good print. That can happen with any of these companies. What would be intersting to see is if you were to get another print, if the quality would be the same as the ones you already recieved. Heck I might even be willing to cover the cost of the garments just to see if you would get the same quality from all of these places twice, whether they were good or bad the first time.
no im not.. i got 3 shirts from ss and they are all great! same with zazzle, but cp and pf, just dont bother.. its just so weird how they pass those shirts for quality check.
basically i ordered shirts with the same design from all 4 companies to check the print/shirt quality and i found my answers.. regarding non screen printing.. i did try one screenprinting company (bluecotton) and they are great but very slow and pricy now..
p.s rodney can you please change the name of my thread to like : spreadshirt,zazzle,cp and pf quality pics
? thanks!
Last edited by SchneiderStudios; March 11th, 2008 at 09:33 PM.
Just out of curiousity, I wonder how far the quality control goes? Does one person print it, another person roll it, another bags and tags, and all 3 missed it? Or the same person doing the printing, does everything? Seems like to me that the cost of paying a team of individuals to check out each shirt before shipping would be money well spent. Not only are they costing themselves money with reprints and shipping, they're costing the shopkeepers happy customers and reorders.
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Hard labor kills, make t-shirts instead.
i know that ss has multiple people, and they have 3 people that check the quality and when they send you the shirt they give you a card and on that it says who checked your shirt and the name of the person, thats nice
i know that ss has multiple people, and they have 3 people that check the quality and when they send you the shirt they give you a card and on that it says who checked your shirt and the name of the person, thats nice
Yeah, that sounds like they've got a good system in place.
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Hard labor kills, make t-shirts instead.
To save PF's reputation, I'm going to order one t-shirt very soon and hopefully I can post it here!
Nobody is saying that all of printfections t-shirts are bad There's no reputation to save.
As Bobbie said, what goes out is only as good as the operator (and QC) people working at that time.
When 1000's of t-shirts ship out a day, with 1000's of different graphics from 1000's of different people who have 1000's of different levels of graphic design experience, it's not hard to understand that a bad print might go out.
Sometimes, the print is bad because the graphic is bad. Not in this case, but if you think about the ease of use of these print on demand companies, not all the people who use their services are experts in DPI, graphic design, vectors, etc.
So there are 1000's of different images that these people have to proof, and not all of them are quality to start with. Some could have blurred edges, jaggies from JPG artifacts, they could be low resolution from the web, they could have been skewed in the design.
There's a lot of factors that can happen that would allow a misprint to get out. Some things that they may consider "misprints" may actually be what the original graphic looks like.
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
I agree with that. And it could also be that the 3 of us that have had similar troubles are the only one's posting about them. You have to admit though that when 2 of us have similar instances with bad prints that are remarkably better when we have them reprinted, that that's just the printer being lazy. It would take the person 2 seconds to hold up the shirt and say, "Wow, that's really off center" or "That's too fuzzy" and do the reprint on the spot.
But I guess going back to a previous point of yours, if it's just a small percentage of returns, I can also understand why they'd rather take a few returns then pay a group of employees an hourly wage to catch a few mistakes here and there.
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Hard labor kills, make t-shirts instead.
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
Quote:
You have to admit though that when 2 of us have similar instances with bad prints that are remarkably better when we have them reprinted, that that's just the printer being lazy.
Not necessarily lazy, but the person doing the check may not have spotted the issue because maybe the other 18 designs that they were checking that hour had bad artwork, so they may have thought that what they "ok'd" was "good" or "close" to what was uploaded.
After the shirt gets sent back, then it would be given more special attention to make sure that the artwork is correct and that the final output is matching as close as possible.
I'm just not ready to make it a cut and dry case of bad quality checks overall. There's a lot more to it.
I'm hoping to do an interview with cafepress and zazzle in the upcoming weeks, so hopefully they'll be able to shed some more light on their QC process.
It's great to see actual photos from each different service though.
I think I may try to do something similar in the future, but using the same graphic so it will be easier to see side by side comparisons of how the different services treat the same graphic.
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
I feel I would prefer the attention to artwork the first time around. I suppose this is just like anything else, some printers/services give higher quality "more consistently". It could be these spot checks are just showing a varying degree of consistency to the high quality. If all of CP's shirts came out mediocre, how would they still be in business? No one delivers 100% quality - 100% of the time. But some services deliver quality on a more consistent basis than others.
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Girlzndollz
I feel I would prefer the attention to artwork the first time around. I suppose this is just like anything else, some printers/services give higher quality "more consistently". It could be these spot checks are just showing a varying degree of consistency to the high quality. If all of CP's shirts came out mediocre, how would they still be in business? No one delivers 100% quality - 100% of the time. But some services deliver quality on a more consistent basis than others.
I would certainly prefer it also and feel like all shopkeepers would too. Like I said earlier, if I'm a shopkeeper putting in good artwork and cp keeps sending out bad quality prints of my items, they're going to cost us both money in the long run. I'm going to lose customers that may have returned if they had gotten a good quality shirt.
I also understand that they do thousands of shirts weekly, and that it's harder to quality control such a large quantity.
I'm always willing to give the benefit of the doubt, so I would definitely be interested in seeing CP and Zazzles sides of the story.
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Hard labor kills, make t-shirts instead.
This is a discussion about Zazzle Vs. Cafepress vs PrintFection vs Spreadshirt, print quality pics! that was posted in the T-Shirt Fulfillment Services section of the forums.
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress, my pics! 
Re: Zazzle Vs. Cafepress, my pics! 
There's no reputation to save.
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