T-shirt Screen Printing or Digital Printing?
Well, have you decided to take a leap and have a few custom t shirts made for your group of friends in college? Are you interested in selling t-shirts that are made using screen printing online? There are websites which let you put up online stores on your website and pay you for each t-shirt sold from there. And what's more, they even pay you for every t-shirt sold using a design that you created. So wake up that artistic genius within you and contribute to the t-shirt screen printing business.
Do you think it matters at all whether you employ screen printing method or digital printing to create your cool t-shirts? What exactly is the difference between the two? T-shirt screen printing is the traditional way wherein the dye is passed through a silk screen and on to the fabric of the t-shirt. Digital printing, on the other hand, is more like printing on a sheet of paper with the help of a digital printer.
The advantage of using a digital printer would be that several colors can be printed at one stroke and does not need any setup work to be done. However, it does have some shortcomings. First of all, the ink has to rather thin so that it will work well in the digital printer which implies that it will yield best results on a t-shirt that is light colored. And even though a small quantity of digitally printed t-shirts can work out quite cheap, bigger lots can work out be quite expensive as compared to the ones using screen printing. So it is obvious that one should go in for t-shirt screen printing in case of bulk orders.
For custom t shirts of darker shades, the only option would be to use screen printing. Since thicker colors are needed to cover the dark colored fabric effectively, digital printing just won't work here. In t-shirt screen printing, thick dye is passed through the screen with the help of a plastic spatula.
Screen printing also called serigraphy or silk screen printing entails making a design stencil and literally imprinting different colored inks into the material of the t-shirt. It is the most often used kind of printing used in branded styles as well as other areas. Following are the advantages of t-shirt screen printing:
' Instead of the ink bonding with the surface of the fabric, it is absorbed by it.
' The size of the design is immaterial as it is possible to even print one covering the entire t-shirt.
' It is perfect for bulk printing as it gets increasingly cheaper as the number of pieces increases.
' T-shirt screen printing gives you a better overall quality and feel.
Of all the print processes, t-shirt screen printing is the longest lasting as it will outlive the life of the t-shirt. Although several forms of print manufacturing might have moved into the age of digital printing, textile screen printing for garments has maintained its position as the most cost effective solution of printing on t-shirts.