Digital Printing Vs Screen Printing T Shirts

We ve previously written about what high quality screen printing is and why we have thousands of happy customers through using it but there s another type of printing that you may have heard of called digital printing which is also known as direct to garment or dtg.

Digital printing vs screen printing t shirts. Screen printing vs digital printing. Screen printing is an age old process when it comes to designing t shirts. Wikipedia defines screenprinting as follows. It is the most traditional and time honored method of transffering an image onto a canvas.

Screen printing involves creating a stencil printers call this a screen and then using that stencil to apply layers of ink. At ramp we use screen printing to print your t shirts. Although relying on toxic inks screen print shirts are still a standard in the t shirt printing industry. Plus digital printing allows us to offer custom tees with no minimum order requirement unlike screen printing which has a 12 piece minimum because of its extensive prep time.

What is dtg printing. It began as an industrial technology and was adopted by american graphic artists in. Screen printing uses screens as stencils in order to directly imprint ink onto the facric of the shirt. Screenprinting silkscreening or serigraphy is a printmaking technique that creates a sharp edged image using a stencil.

Until this time when digital shirt printing is beginning to evolve with the popularity of computer graphics designs and the ability to design unique custom graphics the opportunity to obtain full color graphics without a minimum quantity. Dtg is a rather new t shirt printing method where a digital printer applies ink directly onto the fabric. This makes screen printing limited to a certain kind of print on fabric. Where in dtg the artwork is printed as a whole on the t shirt for screen printing the design has to be broken down into various layers of colors.

Screen printing has been around forever at least since the song dynasty in china around 1000 ad but exploded into modern culture during the 1960s with the popularity of andy warhol s artwork the burgeoning printed t shirt trend and the invention of the rotating multi color screen printing machine.