"Average"

mikelmorgan said:

I'm purchasing a DTG printer. I have been screen printing for over 17 years, I have 2 automatics and 1 manual press. I'm purchasing this dtg to handle my smaller orders. I know my ink cost are going to be much higher but my labor cost will go down with this purchase.

My question is, what is the most common type of graphic you guys print?

What will this machine in your opinion not do well?

What is your personal breaking point as far as screen printing vs dtg printing (at what number would you rather do one over the other)?

Do you charge for the amount of ink your putting down or do you have standard charges that don't necessarily reflect ink usage?

thanks in advance for your input.

Click to expand...

It sucks when no one reply on my post. You have very gentleman questions.
1. Any Graphics. Process, spot, vector you name it they all doing it. There are no limits.
2. In IMHO less than 200 shirts DTG is the winner, going home fast, not messy, no set up, mo films, no ink cleaning, preps. More colors they are less pain on digital printing. Ask yourself 16 color set up and screens and burn screens and clean up.
3. Short run, multi colors, better hands(soft), clean. Greener than screen print. Cheaper and simpler than screen print.
4. Pricing? Please sell art and service. Not ink. Ink usage is just one of your tool you will use. I have customers who sell 1 shirts for $200/ea and $5/ea. Your choice.
5. Anything I missed? Please notice what your customers will ask/say to you before they give you a job? Quality and Service!!!
6. Big quantity digital will lose unless you spend $250K or more. How about 4 secs per print? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=FqYYyuy20Qg
Can you print this fast with your auto?

Mike:

DTG printing is great, but it has some limitations. Be sure to understand the process and be able to speak clearly to your clients about the difference.

You can print millions of colors without screen sure, but you'll have a hard time hitting a true Pantone color accurately. If that's important to your business model - as maybe you print for the ASI or corporate market, then be sure you know what you are getting into.

Also, two crucial and often overlooked steps are the pretreat and curing the ink. If either of these are off, you'll go crazy with production issues. There is plenty of debate about equipment preferences and what works best, but it all comes down to what works for you. In my experience, I like the pretreatment step to be inside the equipment as that removes a lot of the handling if it was a separate step. I also prefer using a dryer, rather than a heat press.

There is some art prep sometimes, and I'd advise plenty of trial and error to get the hang of whatever you buy. The first thing you should do is to print a test print with your most common colors that you want to match, and print this on numerous different colored shirts. Black, white, lime green, purple, etc. Learn how the colors will print and how to adjust to change them to improve the print.

Good luck,

-M