Crickets Chirping.....

[Frog]

Jerid, where do you see the decorating industry going? Do you think in 20 years everything will be done digitally? What bout 10?
Where is the cross over point now between analog and digital (when do you use which one of the processes)?

Where do you see digital going in the next 5-10 years? What will be the innovations brought to our industry?

pierre

Most screen printers see DTG as merely filling the low run niche, thoiugh I still remember the day, six or seven years ago that Brother's rep, (the guy I remember as the "Man in Black") claimed competitive cost effectiveness on process jobs up to 400! I still don't believe it.

[JeridHill]

Printing speeds are always increasing. I don't see totally doing away with screen printing, but I do think in the 20 year time frame, you will see a much greater divide between screen print shops and digital shops. Screen print shops most likely will be large volume and specialty printing like glitter, leather, puff, etc., whereas digital will be from small to large volume. Handling of garments is still always a factor in throughput but the with inks and chemistry being developed all the time to compensate, the printers themselves should be able to handle almost all types of fabrics. I do believe we will see no pretreat necessary and white ink systems more stable than ever.

In five years, I believe we will have a stable system to print on any type of fabric, 5-10 years, maybe the no pretreat technology. There is some now that is UV based, but there are a lot of people allergic to UV, so I'm not sure it's going to take off in it's current configuration and will need more time.

As for the technology itself, we are already seeing 30-40 dark garments an hour on the products we are developing and that's a small platform. So within the next 5 years, we should be able to at least double that with more advanced equipment, etc.

The industry has to be simplified for better stability to the person printing 10 shirts a week, to 1,000 a day. We've been heading that direction as an industry for quite some time and I believe we are there now, but I do think we need just a little more time for the confidence of the end user to be won back over.

[JeridHill]

Oh and the threshold between when to DTG and when to screen print now should be based on 4 color process.

If I can print 30-40 dark garments an hour consistently (let's average it to 35), then how much time does it take you to do a four color process on a black shirt? It's really not four colors but more like 8-9 for a true quality print. So let's say it takes 2 hours for your film output and to make screens, another hour for taping and registration (this would be the average shop on an auto) then 1 hour to ink up and print say a gross of shirts then clean up. If this is the scenario, then you have 4 hours or an average of 36 shirts an hour. So on this particular printer, a gross looks about right. For our previous model, we'd only do about 18 dark garments an hour, so you could say 72.

Light garments are always a much different story. Four color process won't yield as good of a quality as DTG, but the more colors you throw at it, the better the print could be in screen printing. I would always use both. I had one customer that would come to me for the same type of order every time. 144 shirts, full color on the back, 1 color on the front. I would use DTG for the backs and screen print for the front. At the time, I was yielding probably 45 shirts an hour for DTG, whereas now, I can double that.

[inkman996]

We have owned a GT541 for at least 7 years now or so, we got into back when the TJET was all over the market and Brother was finally releasing a true built from the ground up machine. Back then I paid a lot of attention to where it was going always with the hope that white printers would get better, not require pre-treat and have screen print wash fastness. Fast forward to today, DTG is an after thought for me, I do not follow any of the tech anymore simply because in my opinion it has not changed. Sure print heads got a bigger and some machines can pretreat and print all in one but fundamentally it is still what it was almost a decade ago. With that in mind and absolutely nothing on the horizon that is game changing I do not see DTG having any more of an impact in apparel decorating than it does today in the near future (10+ years)

It honestly doesnt appeal to me that you can print 30 to 40 full color dark shirts an hour if it also requires a lot of maintenance and a lot of pre print prep. And the cost of break downs is scary, we already replaced some heads on our Brother and at over $1k a piece I fear having a white printing machine that accidentally got neglected to long and had to replace multiple heads.

[JeridHill]

I understand your thoughts on it. I can tell you that we have been addressing the issues and concerns you have and it's the direction the industry has to go. On our newest equipment, we can push a button and in less than 1 minute, there is no longer any white ink in the head. This can also be automated that after x amount of days of no use, it can force this. We can even connect directly to the printer for any troubleshooting as well as we are building an on-board help system that someone can walk through whatever issue or whatever they are attempting to do, right on the printer. Our newest printer is built from ground up to be specifically DTG so there are quite a few self-maintenance features. I see where we are and what we are now releasing is setting that bar higher. It's why I believe in 10+ years, it will look more advanced than it is today. If you look at what's on the market, I'd agree that there hadn't been a lot of solutions or changes, but when one company brings those solutions to the table, others have to follow or the fade away. I'm not shouting the praises of what we are doing because I know it needs to still be proven over time, but again, it is the direction I see the industry going.

[GraphicDisorder]

DTG will not be able to remotely take over the industry until it can print on all garment types and print faster than a press over long periods, not just initially.

[JeridHill]

I can print on 100% black polyester currently with new inks coming and some machines are rated just as fast as automated screen printing speeds. Even though we can do these things now, I am careful not to make wild claims that in 1 year we'll be here or there. It's going to take time to continue the development and solidify it as well as roll it out industry wide as standards.

[GraphicDisorder]

Can't wait to see that, cause I remember brother telling me we could print on any 100% cotton shirt and that wasn't even true. So 100% poly, thats gonna be a challenge I suspect, will you find this perfect garment for it and pull it off, probably. It needs to be able to print on any type of garment or at least the major ones and in any garment color with no discoloration to the garment.

I know all about the machines on press and how they are getting faster all the time and I still skeptical at this stage of those. Do I think it will get there? Some day. I think we are easily 5-10 years before that tech is as it should be and much longer before its even remotely common place. Remember many screen print shops are still running presses form the 90's. I still walk in shops that use no registration jigs, don't know what a CTS is, and have never even considered that LED's can be used for screen imagining.

Can you out run me on a small job? For sure. The trend in my shop isn't super small jobs. Not that we dont have some 24-36-48pc jobs, we do. But we often are doing jobs that are much larger.

We've been hearing DTG was gonna be huge huge huge for many years and so far its mostly just not in the context of volume of screen print.

[JeridHill]

Well to be fair, silk screening has been around for over 1,000 years but only until the past 40 years has it really started to advance.

I've been in DTG since before white ink and honestly, I was a bit of a skeptic prior to trying this ink. I personally did the tests and pulled an A4 black polyester shirt, which is a very open weave, and it printed better than on some 100% cotton shirts. Then we went for a better quality, tighter weave shirt and the results were truly jaw dropping. Tunnel cured, wash tested and metered before and after many washes. Let's just say, if it passes longevity testing on print heads, we are in the right direction as an industry. The only thing I don't like at this stage is you have to use a different pretreat for dark cotton, light cotton, dark polyester and light polyester. But it's the beginning of the technology and as it improves, I'm sure we'll see it evolve into simplicity.

[GraphicDisorder]

Hey I am a believer of DTG in context I am using it, but I think its a long way out from being any type of remote threat to how this industry prints garments. I have been wrong before.

[JeridHill]

I don't believe next year, but in the 20 year time frame, I can see it.

[mimosatexas]

I started working with a shop that has multiple DTG machines at the beginning of the year (they bought me) and have been learning a lot about DTG while continuing to screen print.  The technology ABSOLUTELY has a place in some shops, and ABSOLUTELY doesn't have a place in others.  It is really great for certain types of jobs and certain types of clients.  We do a lot of on demand order fulfillment and it would be impossible to do what we do for those clients and make money doing it without DTG.  For a shop like Danny's I doubt DTG would make much sense, but for shops who service more retail clients vs wholesale already, or who do variable volume on demand stuff for wholesale folks (and those people can accept and embrace the limitations of the technology when it comes to shirt choices etc) it is a great tool to have available.  That said, it will never replace screenprinting and really shouldnt be viewed as an either/or thing, but just another tool that fills a specific roll.

[JeridHill]

I agree that it won't replace screen printing, I just think in time, there will be a greater divide between the two.

[Frog]

For what it's worth, the poll to I linked earlier (8 hours ago) about services offered, still doesn't have one member who says that they also offer DTG. I know that ain't right!

[merchmonster]

My 2 cents is that our dtg machine turned our catcher into an employee capable of generating $1000 per day gross. She can catch and run the machine at the same time.

The sweet spot for dtg is same as screen print, 12 pcs and up. We stopped doing under 12. Currently running 800 shirts for a cafe, 30 tees for a burger joint, 12 for someone's kid, 4x orders of 50 for a small label brand, 4x 25 for a cannabis dispensary. Ran 150 for 1 day turn for Atlantic records.

There's a market for it, and again, training is much lower to getting a revenue generating employee. I can teach someone in 1 hr how to run dtg, Maybe a month to run an auto