RapidTag vs Pad Printer

[ErinAllenLamb]

We are looking to purchase a machine to print tagless lables inside of our garments.  What are your opinions on the RapidTag system vs a Pad Printer?

Erin

[inkbrigade]

I know that latitudes, a large printer here in Portland had a pad printer and decided to bail on it and got one of those claw multicolor screen printing presses instead

[Inkworks]

The learning curve on padprinting is a big minus. I'm not sure I'd want to learn padprinting on tagless garment printing. That would probably be an exercise in frustration.

If you can get past that, the padprinter is significantly faster and requires no curing/catching/refolding as you can go box to box without even unbundling the shirts from dozen-stacks. It also takes up less space.

Padprinting gives you a less opaque print, which can be a bonus for tagless as you generally don't want heavy ink deposits, but you can't go into it expecting the same type of ink deposit as a silkscreen, it's not even close when padprinting on fabric.

[brandon]

I know that latitudes, a large printer here in Portland had a pad printer and decided to bail on it and got one of those claw multicolor screen printing presses instead

It's true. I saw it in the corner covered in about an inch of dust. Nice machine though. Those guys know what they are doing and just decided to go about it another way.

I want to say the Diamondback L or Mini or whatever it is called is meant for tags. But you can also print something like a 10" print across and 12" down. And there are a lot of shirts out there with smaller prints like that. I would say maybe 1/3 of our jobs would fit in that category. So that gives you a machine that can whip out tags and shirts. And it comes on wheels and you can roll it around the shop! That is pretty bad ass in my book.