One of the services Top Banana Screen Printing offers is direct to garment or DTG Printing. While more and more people are becoming aware of this technology, all of us here at Top Banana thought we could take a moment and explain this process in a little detail.
For smaller print runs, traditional screen printing is not well situated to offer customers good pricing. From color separation, to burning screens, to reclaiming screens, to making sure all the screens are lined up perfectly, makes it very difficult to execute quick turnaround at a fair price for smaller runs. It takes the same amount of time to set up a screen printing run for 1 shirt or 5,000 shirts. DTG Printing is a bit different.
DTG printing makes any garment printing possible and affordable. The art is printed directly onto the apparel digitally, similar to a home or office printer. Because DTG printing is all digitally done, printing a photo realistic, or CMYK image, will be 100% consistent from beginning to end. What’s even better, is the number of colors in a design does not influence the cost per print, whereas screen printing it does matter. What’s even better about DTG printing is it allows Top Banana to offer no minimums and offer a great price to boot!
How quick can we print a shirt with DTG printing? Less than 5 minutes. No kidding. It goes a little something like this. We can:
- Take any image off the internet
- Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop to be print ready
- Send it to the printer
- Print & cure the t-shirt
- …and have it on your back in less than 5 minutes.
Because DTG printing uses Japanese water based textile dyes, the best optimal printing results are on garments which are 100% cotton. Other garments that work well must possess an element of cotton, such as tri-blends, 50% cotton/50% polyester and CVCs, to name a few. The finished print fully bonds to the garment giving it a nice, clean fashion finish.
Top Banana is happy to answer questions that any of our clients, or potential clients, may have about this process. Give us a call or fill out our request form if you would like to come in and get more of a feel for this process and see what Top Banana can do for you. We are conveniently located close to center city Philadelphia.