Design
Is DTF Right?
Nov
With the high cost of living and high cost of renting office spaces, one would decide on having the most minimal and also efficient apparel printing equipments as much as possible. But how is this possible? Is sophistication always the best, and what do you do when you don’t have the means? Let’s take a look at the the best way to start when you don’t have that huge start-up capital
IS DTF WORTH THE NOISE
Ive been in the printing industry for a little over a decade and my staring point was from epson1400 inject to Oki laser printer, then other things came up along the way -using of Xerox printers, Konica Minolta, Laser engraving machines, embroidery machines, etc.
My strength in all these times was apparel decoration, since i studied textiles for my bachelor’s degree. I’ve moved from screen printing of almost anything fabric to sublimation of cotton shirts and then i got into vinyl printing and embroidery along the line.
A combination of vinyl and opaque heat transfer print, cut on silhouette cameo
Although i recently got into dtf printing and dont have much experience in the field, i will join the masses to say “dtf is the game changer”
With limited space and all, Im still able to get around it and achieve some incredible results.
With dtf printing, you can virtually print on any time of garment with a little tweak on time, temperature and pressure on the heat press
BUYING DTF PRINTER
I actualy didnt have a lot of money to invest the the known brands. The only option then ws to look into the epson converted printers from China. There were tons of sellers on Alibaba. Checking on youtube even made it worse. I finally settled on one. Not the most fastest printer I’ve ever used, but with my previous experience with the epson 1400, i knew what I was getting into.
The whole package with cost of duty was about CAD4200. It came with the printer of course, curing oven, roll of 100m dtf film, a set of ink (cmy
kw), 2 usb dongle for software and installation videos, as well as some accessories
The setup wasnt hard for me and took me about 35 minutes to set everything up(we’ll do another post on setup). Once the inks were poured into the tank, film and software were installed, i was ready to go.
The process is quite simple, especially for short runs. This is so because all you need to to setup your design in png or tiff (the rip software accepts pdfs but i mostly prefer png files) and print. Printing the files involve setting up the cmyk and then printing a layer of white on top to help with transparencies, especially on dark garments. Note that the image has to be mirrored before printing
The next step will be applying the powder and curing, and then transferring the prints onto the garment. Set different temperatures, pressures and trasnfer times for different fabrics.Itisa simples process and doestt take a lot of space as compared to screen printing, but requires lots of time and attention
Watch out for part two!!
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