Direct to Garment Printing?
Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 8:17AM We are close to finally purchasing a direct-to-garment printer. First we need to do a little market research, some due diligence and see if there is a need with our customers.
Most of you have seen these printers by now and most of you know what they can do. For those that do not know what they are all about, these new printers print directly on the garment using modified ink jet technology. They print at an almost photo quality resolution. The prints are extremely bright and vibrant. The machine we are looking at is for light garments only, and it would not print white ink.
What I would like to know is if you all have a need for this type of printing. Pricing would be about $5.00 per shirt with a $10 set-up fee to set up a file to get it print ready.
Have any of you used this type of printing for any of your jobs over the last year?
Did you like the quality of the print?
Would you use this type of printing again?
How did the shirt wash?
Do you already have a supplier for this type of printing or would you use us?
I also know some of you have bought these printers, if anyone would like to sell theirs please let us know.
Give us a comment below and let us know your feedback.
Thanks for the Work!
Eric Gibby
Reader Comments (3)
Hi Eric
We have been using the Brother for about 4 years. We may be interested in selling ours, we both work full time and don't have a lot of time to devote to building our busingss. The printer has about 90,000 prints on it which is fairly low for 4 years.
Jody
Great, please e-mail me directly so we can talk.
Egibby@infoscreenprinting.net
I'm so glad you're planning to do this at Info. I've had a couple of small jobs done with this method in the last year and had great results with the imprint. It works best off of JPG files sized for the area of imprint and on 100% cotton shirts. Imprinting on 50/50s is OK, just a little less saturated than all cotton. Light colors, preferably white, are essential to getting good imprint results. I haven't had any feedback from the clients regarding fading of the imprint after washing, so I assume "no news is good news". Most of my clients are pretty price sensitive, so that will be a big determining factor. The other most important things, of course, are quality of the work and reliability of service. Those 3 factors (price, quality, service) along with production time will play into every decision about who to use for production.
Let us know when you're ready to roll with this. I think it will be a great addition to your line-up. Of course, the next step is to get the equipment that uses white ink as well, and then you've got it covered.