The content of this article is an excerpt from the ASPA training course  The Secrets of Printing T-Shirts and How to Make Big Money!

This article is for those of you who offer digital transfers, either inkjet or CLC (color laser copy) transfers. As you know, some customers consider transfer printing negatively and have preconceived notions that you are selling them an "iron on." This is especially true with customers who may have bought digitally imaged shirts that were produced with older generation technology or may have tried to do it themselves at home.

The ideal shirt color for ink jet and CLC transfers is white. Light colored and ash gray t-shirts can also be used.  Regarding choices of shirt colors for transfer printing, it is ultimately up to you to decide whether you feel the "visible transfer window" is objectionable. As previously indicated, colored shirts, even light and pastel colors present the issue of the visible outline of the transfer film. Breakthroughs have been made with transfer paper limiting the "visible window" issue substantially and we recommend that you experiment with colored shirts and with various types of transfer paper.

One sure way to eliminate any objections that a customer may have is to offer to print them a sample shirt before proceeding with any order. You may not want to do this for tiny runs of only a few shirts, but for larger orders this is definitely worth consideration.

Experience has shown that producing a sample shirt almost always results in getting the order and only costs a small amount of money to produce the sample. In addition, sampling acts as your proof for the order as your customer will have had the opportunity to examine the shirt and the imprint carefully.

The advantages of DTG printing is that it is not a transfer print and will produce a high quality directly printed image on the garment for short and medium print runs. DTG printing requires no knowledge of screen printing–only a mastery of your computer, associated software, and the DTG printer itself. A disadvantage of DTG printing is the relatively high cost of the equipment and the inks. 

At this writing, an entry level, single shirt machine will cost you around $15,000. Machines that are capable of printing multiple shirts at once are available, but are significantly more expensive.  In addition, it is necessary to apply a pre-treatment solution to a garment prior to printing and you will need to have a heat press for that purpose as well.

Lastly, while some breakthroughs have been made for printing onto dark colored shirts, that process is still being developed and perfected. At this writing, dark shirt printing capabilities are not universally available from all DTG printer manufacturers.

Despite the claims of some DTG manufacturers, direct to garment printing is not going to replace screen printing. However, direct to garment printing can be a useful solution for printing complex multi-color and photographic images for short run orders. For that reason, direct to garment printing makes it an attractive print method worthy of consideration.

Below are links to manufacturers and vendors who offer DTG printers: www.mimakiusa.com www.brother.com www.kornit-digital.com www.dtgamerica.com www.anajet.com