Screen Printing Forum

There is a lot of discussion in the wide format market about the replacement of screen printing using digital printing.

read entire article here

what do you think?

I'm curious about this technology too. The company I work for is considering going in this direction for some of our workload, but I am skeptical. The costs just seem too great for me. $20.000 for the printer, the inks are very expensive, and an average of 45 seconds to produce one shirt. My gut tells me to wait a few years and see if prices have come down, and the technology has improved.

I don't see it do much in textile printing, but my Screenprinting flatstock has reduced dramatically since I purchased a solvent inkjet printer. All kinds of stickers and banners at the click of a mouse, frees me up to do other things$$$ while machine is working making money.

I recently spoke with a man in the New Orleans area. He lost all his equipment in Katrina. He said if he had it to do over again he would not have spent the $400,000 on several digital printers. He said he did not get anywhere near the volume promised out of any of them. He had 20 machines of different brands, and none of them worked all day. On the average his record was, out of 10 printers 4-6 of them were clogged or down at any given moment.
He said the most shirts he got out of any of the printers was 100 shirts in 8 hours (this was one of the larger machines, not the single printer). He also said for all the down time and babysitting of the machine he could have had thousands of shirts done manually.
I think until the technology is refined, it is a good idea to wait and keep on squeegeing.

Like anything in this world.... Only Time Will Tell

My motto is MORE SHIRTS MORE MONEY!

Leave the 1 an 2 shirt orders to be done at the local mall

someday but not today. I have done a ton of research and have compared samples. you can still do better if you have a good printer who know hows to manage time with both a manual an automatic press.

www.taylormadetshirts.com

Digital technology is new and cool....but it won't replace screen printing any time soon. Here's some of what I've gathered about the subject....

• Digital machines are a great solution for 1-12 highly detailed and multi-colored shirts. The technology is young and still needs vast improvement before it attempts to compete with screen printing on a large scale.
  
  Printing on darks can still be a problem for some digital machines.
  
  Recently (at SGIA Vegas) I got up close and personal with some of the shirts printed by these machines. One shirt, I took from the conveyor dryer after they supposedly cure the ink, and I was able to scratch the ink off the shirt with my finger nail! I think that most of these machines need you to heat press the final image before it is set into the garment.
  
  The high volume direct to garment machines are extremely expensive. When you consider you could almost purchase 2-3, 16 color automatic screen printing presses for about the same price as a high volume direct to garment printer....it just doesn't make much sense financially. You would be able to output almost 4 times as many shirts with a couple of 16 color autos.

Even if the price was right and you could output a high number of garments with these machines, they still wouldn't replace screen printing. What many people don't realize is the high cost of the ink used by the digital printers and the high cost of maintenance. I've heard that these machines need huge amounts of servicing to keep everything clean and the ink flowing. The ink might be approximatly the same price as plastisol, but you use far more ink in the direct-to-garment machines per shirt.

I would invest in one as a sample or small run printer only. If you got a small unit just for this purpose, it would probably pay for itself quickly because you wouldn't have to stop your other presses to run a sample or two.

Just my 2 cents!