Process
Screen printing vs DTG, and why we still pull by hand
Two ways to get ink onto a shirt. They fail differently, cost differently, and suit completely different businesses.
If you are starting a clothing line, this is one of the first real decisions you make, and most of the advice online is written by companies selling one of the two options.
How each one works
Screen printing pushes thick plastisol or water-based ink through a mesh stencil onto the fabric. One screen per colour. The ink sits on top of the fibres and is cured with heat until it bonds.
DTG — direct to garment — is effectively a large inkjet printer that sprays water-based pigment straight onto the shirt. No screens, no setup, one machine.
Durability
Screen printing wins, and not narrowly. A properly cured plastisol print will outlast the garment under normal washing. It fails by cracking, which happens when the print is flexed after being embrittled by heat — a hot dryer, mostly.
DTG fails differently. Because the pigment soaks into the fibres rather than sitting on them, it fades rather than cracks. On a white shirt this can look acceptable for a long time. On a dark shirt, DTG requires a white underbase that fades faster than the colour above it, and after twenty or thirty washes you can usually tell.
Both survive far longer if you follow the same rules we put on our care guide: wash cold, inside out, dry low.
Cost and run size
Screen printing has a high setup cost and a near-zero marginal cost. You pay to burn a screen for each colour, register the plates, and pull a test. After that, the two-hundredth shirt costs barely more than the twentieth.
DTG inverts this. No setup at all, but every shirt costs roughly the same to print. That makes it excellent for one-offs and terrible at volume.
| Run size | Screen print, per unit | DTG, per unit |
|---|---|---|
| 1–10 | Very high | Low |
| 25 | Comparable | Comparable |
| 100 | Low | Unchanged |
| 500+ | Very low | Unchanged |
The crossover sits somewhere between twenty-five and forty units for most two-colour jobs. Below that, DTG. Above it, screens.
Colour and detail
DTG handles photographs, gradients and unlimited colours because it is an inkjet. Screen printing cannot do any of that without halftone tricks, and each additional colour means another screen, another registration and another chance for the plates to drift.
That constraint is exactly why we use it. Two inks force you to design in two inks. It is the same discipline that makes riso printing and old concert posters look the way they do, and it is not recoverable once you have unlimited colours available.
Which to choose
Choose DTG if you are printing on demand, selling a wide catalogue in small quantities, or your artwork genuinely needs photographic detail.
Choose screen printing if you run in batches of fifty or more, want the print to outlive the shirt, or want a house look that comes from a limited palette.
We print runs of 120 in two colours on 320gsm cotton, so the decision was never close. You can see how the offset registration reads on a finished garment on the Misregister Tee.