Three printing methods cover almost every garment job. Here is what each one is actually good at, where each falls down, and a simple way to pick.
In this article · 4 sections
Almost every printed garment you have ever worn was made one of three ways: direct to garment, direct to film, or screen printing. Each method has a job it is genuinely best at, and most bad merch experiences come from using the wrong one for the job in hand.
DTG: direct to garment
DTG works like an inkjet printer for fabric. Water-based inks go straight into the fibres of the garment, which makes it the natural choice for detailed, colourful artwork: photographs, gradients, illustrations with lots of tones. Because there is no setup beyond pretreatment, one shirt costs the same to print as the fiftieth, which is exactly why it suits print on demand.
Its limits are fabric and feel. DTG wants cotton, ideally combed ringspun cotton, and it prints best on light and dark garments that have been pretreated properly. On polyester-heavy blends the ink cannot bond well and colours wash out.
DTF: direct to film
DTF prints the design onto a film, binds it with a powdered adhesive, and heat presses it onto the garment. The print sits on the fabric rather than in it, which gives you bold, opaque colour on almost any material: cotton, polyester, blends, nylon panels, caps, tote bags and the awkward stuff DTG cannot touch.
The trade is hand feel. A DTF transfer has a slight surface presence you can feel, a bit like a modern, much better-behaved version of the old iron-on transfer. For bold logo work and sportswear that is rarely a problem. For a soft vintage wash look, DTG wins.
Screen printing
Screen printing pushes ink through a stencilled mesh screen, one screen per colour. Setting up those screens takes real time and money, which is why screen printers quote minimum quantities. Once the screens exist, each additional print is fast and cheap, and the ink lays down thick, vibrant and extremely durable.
That cost curve is the whole story. At five hundred identical shirts with a two-colour logo, screen printing beats everything on price per unit. At one shirt, the setup cost makes it absurd.
How to pick in practice
- Detailed art, cotton garments, small quantities: DTG.
- Bold graphics, mixed fabrics, caps and bags: DTF.
- One design, few colours, hundreds of units: screen printing.
On allthe you can order DTG and DTF for made-to-order work, with no minimum, and every product page in the catalogue shows which methods each blank supports, so the choice is made where you can see the garment, its fabric and its print areas together.