[breakaway]

If nobody told you, and you went to a store and saw a shirt, could you tell the difference?

 

[Modati]

Yea, you can feel the ink with screening usually. After a while you develop and eye for it.

 

[treadhead]

Yes...if the screenprinting ink used is plastisol. You may not be able to tell as much if it were waterbased ink in my opinion. However, DTG on dark shirts using the white underbase is closer in feel to a good screenprint job. On lighter shirts, there is no hand (feel) to DTG at all.

 

[splathead]

Assume you mean differences with plastisol silkscreening?

Yes. Firstly, dtg uses a water based pigment ink. There is no or little hand.

Colors are not as vibrant as you could get with plastisol silkscreening (bracing myself for an onslaught of disagreement ) You don't get that pop of color out of a dtg like you would with silkscreening.

Also, the sheer number of colors or color shading would be greater with dtg.

The differences are not so great when you compare water based silkscreening to dtg. The giveaway usually is the number of colors a dtg printer can give you.

 

[Rodney]

On dark garments, since the DTG requires an underbase, I think it would have more of a feel to it.

Depending on the design, I think it's possible to tell the difference between the two.

 

[out da box]

I've seen some shirts at the beach with a bunch of colors and amazing detail, I know... at least I think... they were screen printed, but I could barely tell. Up really close you could see the halftones, plus there were a LOT of them , so I know they were screen printed. It would be impossible for the average consumer to tell the difference.