What is a DTG Printer?

T-Shirt Printing For All - A Custom T-Shirts Podcast

What is a DTG Printer?

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Today we’re going to talk about what a DTG printer is and how you can leverage them when you’re doing Tshirt printing.

A DTG printer uses a special type of printer that allows you to print directly onto a garment. DTG is short for direct to garment printing. 

How Does DTG T-Shirt Printing Work?

First,  we spray your shirt down with a solution and cure it under heat. Then we print your artwork directly onto the shirt. Now, if you’re confused about the different types of Tshirt printing services there are: there’s sublimation, screen printing, direct to garment, and direct film. We’ve actually gone over these in this article. 

When are you going to use DTG printers? 

In multiple scenarios, the most likely one is when you have artwork that has lots of color or has full color photos. Things like paintings that have 8-12 colors, that just wouldn’t be efficient for a screen printer to take apart and produce on their screens. You would also use direct to garment printing in a low quantity project. So if you have only 5 or 10, screen printing is probably not going to be cost efficient for you.

With direct to garment printing, if you wanted to, you could technically print one T shirt, and that’s it. You don’t need to print 20, you don’t need to pay for 100 to get a good per unit price..

Keep in mind, with DTG printing you do not need to print more than one. That’s one of the efficiency models that you’ve ever seen, especially in the custom garment business. It is really cool to be able to take someone’s artwork and produce one off  and not waste water(if you didn’t know, it takes 700 gallons of water to produce one T-shirt.

When else are you going to use direct to garment printing? When you personalize a bunch of shirts. So for example, if you have a marathon and you have 500 people running in this marathon. If each one wants to personalize their name on the back, that is where direct to garment printing is going to come in really handy..

There are some drawbacks to DTG Printers.

The only two drawbacks you should know about with DTG.  #1 There’s no economies of scale. Eventually there comes a point where if you wanted to print 200 units direct to garment is never going to be the way to do it. You would have to take it as screen printing unless it was, full color prints, then you would have to do it through DTG. Another place where director garment kind of struggles is in producing that solid &  thick color look that people are used to with screen printing. Direct to garment printing will print right onto the fabric so the ink becomes one with the fabric.

Some people will tell you that direct to garment printing is not a high quality. That is not true. The printer using the press doesn’t know how to use it. We have produced some of the most beautiful prints that you would ever see from a direct to garment press and they last.

Any bad conception that you have of direct garment is not direct to garment technique, it’s the printer itself. If you have any questions about the direct garment world or the T shirt printing business, please let us know.