Heat transfer vinyl, DTG and screen print compared

There is a fourth and a fifth method, and a sixth if you count sublimation, but these three cover almost everything you will be offered when you ask somebody to put a design on a shirt.

Heat transfer vinyl

A machine cuts your shape out of a sheet of coloured vinyl. Someone weeds out the bits that should not be there — the inside of an O, the counters of an A — lays the rest on the garment, and presses it with heat until the adhesive grabs.

It is the right tool for a very specific job: a small number of garments carrying text, numbers or other flat shapes. A softball roster with twelve different surnames and twelve numbers is a vinyl job. Nobody has to make twelve screens and nobody has to run twelve separate print files; someone cuts twelve names and presses them.

Its limits are hard ones. Each colour is a separate layer of vinyl pressed on top of the last, so three colours means three layers and a stiff patch you can feel through the shirt. Photographs are out. Fine detail is out, because the weeding becomes impossible below a certain size — try cutting 8pt text out of vinyl and you will see why. Vinyl also peels eventually, usually at a corner, usually after a hot dryer.

DTG

Water-based ink sprayed into the fabric from print heads, cured with heat. No colour limit, no setup, so no minimum. A photograph costs the same as a word.

The print is in the shirt rather than on it, so there is nothing to feel and nothing to peel. In exchange it needs cotton to work properly, and it fades gradually over a long life instead of staying put and then cracking.

This is what we run, on Brother GTX machines, which is also why most of our blanks have no minimum.

Screen printing

Ink through a mesh stencil, one screen per colour. High setup, very low cost per piece once you are running, and the toughest print of the three by a clear margin.

Built for volume with simple art. Two hundred shirts with a one-colour logo is exactly the job, and it will be cheaper per shirt than either other method.

Side by side

Where each one wins, stated bluntly:

• Vinyl: a handful of garments carrying surnames or numbers in two flat colours
• DTG: anything from one to fifty garments, with any artwork at all, photographs included
• Screens: a hundred and fifty upwards, one or two colours, deadline not urgent
• DTG again, for a soft hand with nothing to feel
• Screens again, for maximum toughness through industrial laundry
• DTG once more if it has to be in your hands today

What usually decides it

Quantity decides it more often than people expect, and colour count decides the rest. The artwork almost never needs to change to suit the method, which is worth saying because designers sometimes flatten a gradient out of habit before asking whether they had to.

If you are weighing up a specific order, our longer screen print versus DTG comparison goes further into cost crossover. For a run of team garments, the piece on group orders covers names and sizes.