DTF & DTG Printing

Count the colours in your design and the units in your order. If your artwork has one to three flat colours and you are ordering several hundred pieces or more, screen printing is almost certainly the right answer: it lays down a thicker, more durable and more opaque layer of ink, it handles solid blocks on dark fabric better than anything else, and its per-unit cost falls as quantity rises because the setup is spread wider. If your artwork is photographic, has gradients, or uses more than about four colours, screen printing becomes impractical or expensive, and DTF handles it at no extra cost per colour. The crossover point depends on your specific design, so send us the artwork and the quantity and we will quote both and tell you which we would choose, including when that means recommending against the newer method.

Where the ink ends up. DTF prints onto a film and heat-presses that film onto the garment, so the print sits on top of the fabric. That makes it work on almost any fibre, including polyester and blends, and on dark colours without difficulty, and it holds fine detail well. The cost is hand-feel — across a large solid area you can feel the print as a distinct layer. DTG sprays ink directly into the fabric, so the print becomes part of the garment and feels much softer, which is why it suits premium tees where hand matters. But DTG needs high cotton content, requires pretreatment on dark garments, and is slower per unit. In short: DTF for versatility and dark or synthetic fabric, DTG for the softest result on cotton.

Screen printing is more durable, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. A properly cured screen print on cotton will typically outlast the garment. A good DTF print, correctly applied and cured, holds up well through normal domestic washing — commonly fifty washes or more without significant loss — but it is a surface-applied film, so it is more vulnerable to cracking at fold lines, to high-temperature tumble drying, and to ironing directly over the print. Much of what people report as poor DTF durability comes from under-curing or the wrong pressing parameters rather than from the method itself. We wash-test prints on your actual fabric before bulk and will tell you what care instruction to print on the label, because the difference between good and poor longevity is largely in how it is handled after purchase.

Yes, and it is often the sensible choice. A common pattern is a large screen-printed back graphic in one or two colours, where screen gives the best coverage and price, combined with a small full-colour DTF badge on the chest that would have cost four extra screens to do any other way. Embroidery can be added on top of either for a logo that needs a premium, tactile finish. Because everything happens in our own building, mixing methods does not mean shipping garments between suppliers or adding a fortnight to the schedule. Send us the full artwork package with placements marked and we will propose a method per placement, with the reasoning, rather than defaulting everything to a single technique.

Somewhere in the low thousands, though the exact point depends on how many colours your design has. The economics are straightforward: screen printing has a fixed setup cost per colour that is spread across the run, so its per-unit price keeps falling as quantity rises. DTF has almost no setup cost but a fairly flat per-unit cost, so it barely gets cheaper at volume. That means DTF is markedly cheaper for a hundred pieces and markedly more expensive for five thousand. A one-colour design flips to screen printing quite early; a full-colour photographic design may never flip at all, because screen simply cannot reproduce it. If you expect to scale, tell us your projected volumes and we will show you where the crossover falls for your artwork.