[cadichick]

Hi,
I need advise, I am looking for a DTGP for our small manufacturing business. We will be printing about 2000-4000 tees a month.
We want a good quality work horse machine, that is easy to use and has a high quality print. Quality will be a priority to us.

We are willing to spend up to $15k if we have to (if it is worth it)
but I want to to know if I can get away with a machine that is half that price and get good quality, and will work just as good. Or is the old saying, "you get what you pay for"? Obviously I would rather pay the least amount possible.

I don't know much about these machines, as this is new to us.
Any advise????? Thanks~

 

[Smalzstein]

For this amount of printing you may need a 30$+ machine like M2 or Anajet MP5

 

[GraphicGuru]

If you're seeking under $10K dtg printers, you have the following options:

1) Easy T Printer
2) Moment Jet - EZ
3) 2nd hand

 

[charles95405]

There is no way I would try to do 2000(or 3000) shirts a month with a 12k or under DTG . with that volume...are you considering bulk shirts or one offs...are you planning on doing darks..if so you sure should get a pretreatment booth...manual pretreatment is a killer under you get it right...I never was able to get the pretreatment correct...and ruined a lot of shirts trying...which ever you select...get one that has support and service reasonably close to you...you will need to get training on the machine...these are not plug and play units and all are maintenance intensive. be sure to do the math....see how long it will take to get your investment back

 

[cadichick]

Thanks for the feedback- it all sounds confusing, as we were hoping it would be a push the button see results kind of thing like most of the videos show. We have two sides to our business; sampling and production. I was thinking we could do our own production; but now I am thinking using for sampling only. We just spent $3500 to a screen printer for doing samples only for one season. We sample 3-4 times a year. So we will put out at least 10K + in sampling alone this year. That is why we were thinking getting our own machine.
We will need to print on darks-- we do probably more darks than anything. But we do 100% cotton mostly.
Any advise from here??

 

[estrada]

The only DTG I know under 10K that prints dark shirts is the easy T printer. A dark shirt would print in 4-6 minutes depending on the image size and underbase resolution. So let's say you get a shirt every 6 minutes, that's 10 shirts an hour. So 8 hours a day that's 80 shirts a day. Let's say you work overtime and you are very good at loading shirts and you have no problems with the machine during the entire day. The best case scenario you get 100 shirts every day. That's 500 a week and 2000 a month.

This does not take into account the time it takes to pretreat the shirt and to prepare the image. And as Charles pointed out, if you are doing volume you should get an automatic pretreatment machine, that's about $4,000. So $7,000 for and Easy T printer and $4,000 for a Viper one pretreatment machine = 11k.

If you want bigger production, like 4,000 shirts a month, you should get 3 printers or an anajet mp10. Here we talk about 30k.

If you want a printer to do samples only, and use it 3-4 times a year, dtg is NOT a good option. These machines should be run every day for optimal performance.