Let's talk about the Aeoon DTG.

[Rockers]

I don't think you can compare a few Brothers to a Kornit, any Kornit.
The Kornit was designed from scratch to be a digital printer, i don't think there is anything on the market that comes close to it in terms of quality.
It's like comparing a Mercedes to a Subaru.

I disagree, I'd say to the general person buying DTG shirts (ie. Custom Ink) they wouldn't really know the difference between the end product on either machine.

Also, the comparison is that when your one Mercedes is broken down, it is expensive to fix, and how many techs are in the field for Kornits in the US, as well as your few Subaru's, one breaks down and you have backups that keep production running.

As Frog said, you would have to worry about labor of running multiple DTG printers, but I think one operator could run a few machines at a time as they take a few minutes to print a tee.

Custom Ink uses brother printers, I'm pretty Zazzle, the Printful and other DTG companies all run more small machines, I'm not really sure the target market of Kornit printers, there is a person in Portland that area that has one but they aren't that great of operators so their print quality is not that great even with the Kornit Storm.

I would however love to have a Vulcan, but my target customer we would never see a profit from the machine until they come down in cost.  Sell me a Vulcan for 80k and I'm there.

There are a lot of DTG only shops here in Japan running big Kornit machines. Shame they can`t really use them proper, whenever we had to place an order for some DTG prints the result we got back from those shops was, pardon my English,  piss poor. I think their staff is not trained very well. I`m pretty sure they could have got the same poor result with an Epson DTG.

[mk162]

DTG isn't plug and play that's for sure.

I will say there are some new shirts coming out that are pretreated all over.  The fabric is treated at the mill.  It's really cool and the results are pretty good from what I've heard.  The only downside is they sold out of the first production run.

https://rtpapparel.com/

[GraphicDisorder]

DTG isn't plug and play that's for sure.

I will say there are some new shirts coming out that are pretreated all over.  The fabric is treated at the mill.  It's really cool and the results are pretty good from what I've heard.  The only downside is they sold out of the first production run.

https://rtpapparel.com/

Interesting. I would just add...not all inks will work well with all pretreats, I can tell you that specifically since we tried Brother on M&R and M&R on Brothers. So I wonder how that will shake out.

[bulldog]

Those already pretreated shirts are using Image Armor. Right now I use Image Armor pretreat and inks...I've had mixed results honestly. The #1 pro is 35 second cure. The biggest con is inconsistency. I constantly have to mess with things. I might switch back to Dupont soon.

Sunfrog which claims to be the largest DTG printer now has an army of Brother printers. I've seen at least 55 in one of their youtube videos (they probably have hundreds) and several firefly dryers. Crazy stuff, more than I'd want to handle for sure.

[shirtshack]

I also have seen the sun frog video, I was surprised to see a setup of that size using brothers, cheaper equipment investment and redundancy if any machines fail but the ink cost must be being offset somehow, either a really good deal with brother or that are refilling the cartridges themselves.

[Maxie]

We have a Kornit Paradigm, the one that sits in the carousel.
We screen print our pre treatment, I'm sure someone with a manual press could do the same.
We tape up the size of the image and screen the pre treatment, if its a big order we make a screen like the white base and print pre treatment only where the image is printing.
You need to test different meshes to see which works for you.
Do they charge more for the pre treated shirts?