We Don't Want Stickers on Our T-Shirts Either

We are a garment printer that uses DTF every single day, and we will happily say the thing our own industry avoids saying: a lot of DTF printing feels like a plastic sticker glued to a shirt. That criticism is fair. It just isn't a description of what DTF has to be.

The photographs in this article are close-ups of prints coming off our own production equipment in Malta. Look at the white areas. You can see the weave and the individual fibres of the fabric through the ink. That is not a slab of material sitting on top of the garment. It is a print bonded into the surface of the textile.

The criticism is sometimes justified

Badly produced DTF can be thick, rubbery, stiff and unpleasant to wear. If there is too much colour ink, too much white, too much adhesive powder or too much heat, you end up with exactly what nobody wants: a sticker on a shirt.

A lot of DTF printing really does feel like plastic. That describes bad DTF, not DTF.

So when somebody tells us they do not like DTF because it feels like plastic, we understand. They have almost certainly been given bad DTF.

DTF is not the problem. Bad DTF is

There is an enormous difference between owning a DTF printer and knowing how to produce excellent DTF.

The finished result is decided by the whole process:

• artwork preparation and how the file is built
• halftoning and total ink coverage
• how much white ink is laid down underneath the colour
• ink quality
• adhesive powder application
• curing
• transfer temperature, pressure and dwell time
• the characteristics of the garment itself

Get those wrong and you get the infamous DTF sticker. Get them right and the result can be soft, flexible, detailed, vibrant and genuinely comfortable to wear.

That is why we do not treat DTF as pressing a transfer onto a shirt. We treat it as an industrial printing process, with the controls an industrial process needs.

Look closely at the white

These are not marketing renders or manufacturer samples. They are photographs of real production.

The white is where DTF is usually exposed, because white is where most of the material sits. In these prints you can still read the structure of the textile through it. That is precisely what we are aiming for: enough ink and adhesive for strong colour, opacity, durability and wash resistance, and no more material than the job actually needs.

More is not always better. With DTF, knowing how little you can successfully put down matters as much as knowing how much.

Enough ink for solid colour and wash resistance. No more material than the job actually needs.

Put a print like this next to some conventional screen printing and the DTF can look and feel more integrated into the garment, not less.

Where screen printing still fits

Screen printing is a fantastic process and it absolutely has its place. We use it, we understand it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

But modern DTF has changed a great deal. For the enormous range of work a commercial garment printer sees in a week, we believe professionally produced DTF is one of the best and most versatile garment decoration technologies available today. It gives us fine detail, effectively unlimited colours, smooth gradients, consistency from garment to garment and real flexibility on quantity, from one piece to a few thousand.

And when it is produced properly, it does not have to feel like a transfer at all.

That is the bit people miss. A cheap DTF print and an industrially produced, properly profiled DTF print use the same printing method, and the finished garments can still be worlds apart.

Same printing method. Completely different garment in your hands.

So if you have decided you do not like DTF because it feels like a sticker, we are not going to argue with you.

We do not want stickers on our T-shirts either. That is exactly why we have spent so long learning how not to make them.