Direct To Garment printing
What it is
So Direct To Garment printing is pretty cool. DTG printing uses special inks to print right on to a piece of clothing.
Why it’s cool
To my knowledge, there’s three ways of printing on fabric. Ok four if you count just spray painting or air brushing a shirt. But here are the real three:
- Heat press: this is just glorified iron-on, and there have been some advancements in heat-pressing in recent years, including some cool self-weeding printable vinyl made for heat press. But I don’t really think it’s a professional product. There’s also sublimation printing, which falls under this header, but I don’t know much about it.
- Screen printing: you know what screen printing is. It’s awesome. It’s my favorite thing in the world. But it can get complicated and expensive with lots of colors and it can’t do rasterized images.
- And the third is DTG printing.
DTG printing is just like any other CMYK printer, except that it can print on to certain fabrics (treated fabrics, more on that later). With DTG, you can print full color images, including photos, directly on to a piece of fabric. As far as I know, a DTG printed garment will hold up about as well as a screen printed garment.
How it can be more economical than screen printing
It’s kind of a perfect middle ground for small-run projects. Like there’s usually a minimum number of shirts you can screen print if you’re ordering from a shop so that they can offset the cost of labor and materials. But with DTG, a single shirt takes as much labor and material per shirt as 30 shirts. In fact, given the price of DTG inks, it’s actually better to do small-run stuff on a machine like this. And even thought a single piece will probably cost more to print with DTG than a single heat-press shirt, the end product is of substantially higher quality and longevity.
That’s why I thought it might be an interesting prospect for SCCA. I think that most of what we end up printing is small-run stuff, like a single shirt for a portfolio piece or whatever. I don’t imagine this machine would get more use than one of the 3D printers, but maybe its cost could be justified by the quality of the material it turns out.
Also there’s a coolness factor that should be acknowledged.
Some shortcomings
Professional DTG printers are really expensive. There are non-professional DTG printers, but they are very bad.
DTG inks aren’t exactly cheap.
(That’s for one 250ml bottle of Cyan)
Also, the fabrics need to be cured with a pre-treatment machine, which are really expensive.
Conclusion
I think a DTG printer might be a valuable resource, especially if we could maybe print garments for the school or something – like the school might be more willing to foot the bill for this sort of thing if we could defray the cost of outsourcing their garment-printing needs, which is assuming they have any garment-printing needs. If you want to see one of these printers in action, they have one at The Foundry.