Screen Printing vs DTG vs DTF vs Embroidery

Ink pushed through a mesh stencil, one screen per color, cured with heat. It is the oldest method here and it is still the best one for volume, which is not an accident.

The deposit is thicker than anything digital can lay down, so colors are denser and the print survives a lot of washing. On a dark garment a screen-printed white reads properly white rather than grey.

The cost is in the setup. Every color in your design needs its own screen burned and registered, and that work happens once whether you print twelve shirts or twelve hundred. Spread across a big run it disappears. Spread across a small one it dominates.

This is what we run most volume work on. More detail on the screen printing page.

Direct to film. The artwork prints onto a coated film, adhesive powder is applied and melted, and the whole thing is heat pressed onto the garment.

It has quietly become the most useful method for small orders. No setup, unlimited colors, works on cotton, polyester, blends and things screen printing struggles with, and the color is genuinely vivid on dark garments.

The trade-off is that it sits on the fabric rather than in it, so you can feel it more than a DTG print. Modern DTF is not the cracking peeling vinyl of two decades ago, but it is still a layer on top rather than part of the shirt.

More on the DTF printing page.

Direct to garment. An inkjet printer sprays water-based ink straight into the fibres of the shirt. The print becomes part of the fabric, so at its best you can barely feel it.

It is superb for full-colour artwork on cotton in small quantities. Photographs, gradients, illustrations with dozens of shades, all handled without a thought about color count.

It wants cotton. On polyester and heavy blends the ink has nothing to bond into, and on very dark garments it needs a white underbase that firms up the hand feel. Slower per piece than everything else here, which is why it does not scale.

More on the DTG printing page.

Thread stitched through the garment by a multi-needle machine reading a digitized file. It is not really competing with the other three, because it is going for a different look entirely.

Embroidery reads as expensive. On a polo, a cap, a jacket or a fleece it does something no print can, and it will not crack, fade or peel because there is no ink involved at all.

It has two real limits. Fine detail and small text disappear below a certain size because a stitch can only be so small, and every logo needs a one-time digitizing charge to convert the artwork into a stitch path. That charge makes embroidery awkward on a single piece and irrelevant on a dozen.

More on the embroidery page.

Every time you change the quantity, the artwork or the print locations, the studio runs the numbers twice. Once as a screen-printed job with the screens your design would need, and once as a digital transfer priced on the area the art covers.

Then it shows you the lower of the two. You never see which one won, because from your side it does not change anything about the order.

In practice a one-color design crosses over to screen printing somewhere around a dozen pieces, a four-color design around two dozen, and a big full-colour design closer to four dozen. All of which is a long way of saying that if you are ordering more than a couple of dozen shirts, you are probably getting screen printing.