Screen Printers Open - A Forum for Screen Printing and Embroidery

I have been following the DTG side of the business since I realized how difficult screen printing can be and do so by observing the forums and reading as many of the threads about them that I have time for.  There has been a recent spike in activity at the blue board on the idot and that got me wondering.  When these machines first came out, what, 8-10 years ago, is this where they expected them to be?  God I hope not.  I thought the m&r machine would be different, and they "perfected" it before they introduced it to the market.  I know some will say that they are great, but out of the small number of users on the boards that have them, most seem to have a hell of a time with them.  Another guy on digitsmith the other day popped off by saying that dtg is the future and to the affect of taking over screen printing as the main method of printing.  I called BS on it, because I've been hearing that for 5 years now, and quite frankly, the dtg machines (for the most part) are well below what I would call a money making tool for the average shop.  There is no way in hell I would shell out 20K for something that I'm going to have to pamper like some Hollywood starlet with no talent and huge tits.  I know Sam is making millions off of his but he seems to be the anamoly in this discussion.

From what it sounds like to me, the Brother has the least amount of issues and doesn't require 4 hours of PM for 4 hours worth of work.  I do not know if the one that prints white ink is the same or not, maybe Mike can say for sure.

Seems like the idot isn't what I thought it would be either.  Looking at all the threads on that machine, the posts are strikingly similar to all the ones I've read on the other boards, maybe not to the extreme that the t-jet got to, but still dissapointing to say the least.  Maybe it's slightly better than most other dtg's, I can't tell, I just know I wouldn't buy any dtg that printed white ink. 

I used to love reading those troubleshooting threads on all the forums, I got a kick out of them and they usually went something like this (and this isn't really hyperbole speaking either)... 

My prints look like S, what's wrong? 
Well, did you try this?  Yes 
Ok, did you do that?  Yes
How much pretreatment did you apply?  Perfect amount
How old is your ink?  Got it in yesterday.  Welp, that may be your problem, sorry.
How old is your pretreatment?  One week today.  Yeah, it's probably contaminated with screen printing air that's way too humid.
What is your relative humidity where the machine is located?  About 35%.  That's not good sir, it probably needs to be around 30%  Ok, it's 30% now. Actually 29.658% would be perfect, if you can maintain that for a few days, that should get your machine back on track.
Did you have this setting on _____?  What's that?
Did you shake the cartidges like it says in the manual?  Always
Did you shake them vertically or horizontally? Because if you did it horizontally, you screwed up big time, they aren't make to be shook like that!  Nope, vertical, just like you said.
Did you do a nozzle check? 7 of them just today, they look bad, and used $189 worth of ink!
Did you do a power head cleaning?   Yes, and it didn't fix the problem, it just made it worse.
Did you read the manual? 28 times so far 
Did you try holding a long piece of tin foil with your left hand, cup your jollies just right with the right hand, reset the machine with your big toe on the left foot while stoming the shit out of a baby bird with your right foot?   Seriously, that's what I have to do to get this thing to work?  It's worth a shot.

So, let's share some info, good and bad about where DTG is at.  I would like to know if I need to keep following this activity or not.  Has anybody besides Sam made a killing off of their machine?  Maybe Mike and the Brother?

Good thread Alan and very entertaining, I could probably add a small novel of funnies to it as well.

It has been close to four years now with our Brother, still running quite strong, no new print heads yet and never an issue to support yet, had an issue with a print head once but it resolved itself go figure. As for making a killing, hardly man hardly, and never expected to either. We got the machine to backup our printing and embroidery, and to finally be able to offer something to those PITA few piece customers. Some months we make a killing on it some are really slow and essentially only been used for printing small garments that the press could not accommodate during the press run.

The machine has gone well over a week without being turned on and never had a prob as of yet, initially I turned it on daily but eventually realized it was not necessary, the biggest reason is the machine is built from the ground up and the nozzles on the print heads are I believe twice the size as epsons. I am not trying to plug Brother, honestly it is quite an expensive machine and in our situation we can afford to have it idle at times, it will not put us out of business, for a start up it would hurt something fierce to sit idle for a week or more.

As for the White the little I have heard is promising, much less issues than epson converts but still struggles with the fundamental issues of white ink. Bigger print heads does equal less clogging. But the machine is extremely expensive, even brothers moral compass suggests the machine is for an established commercial business, that is something rarely seen in this business eh?

What you see over on blue's forum is the same thing any manufacturer that converts an epson will deal with. The inner workings of the printer is still epson, not Idot. Lots of times their best techs have to use process of elimination till they figure it out, at the end of the day they are not super epson techs but Idot techs, it is why i would never ever touch an epson convert machine to many damn issues. If I had a machine print the white base then start the next way off register and have a tech act like no biggie then i would probably go to jail for going postal, there is to much money involved in the shirt and the ink to have it seem trivial.

My thoughts on the state of digitial printers is this, companies need to stop copying Fresner and converting epsons and take the time to build one from the ground up for themselves. Big Blue has buyers loyalty to support their crappy epsons so they are selling them, I actually feel bad for some of them folks struggling over there.

I see you have noticed Alan that anytime a problem arises they all scramble to point the blame on the user, rarely the printer, when it gets close to being the printer fault, they concede to either Epsons fault or call support.

Well thats my thoughts anyways, is DTG taking over? ask Fresner

Nice opinions Clark but you shouldnt assume for everyone if you do not what or how everyone is doing with their machines.

As I stated in my post we never bought one to make any real money off of, it is a support piece that complements our decorating abilities, it takes a certain amount of stress of when we have to do a repeat order and all we have to do is fire up the heat press instead of setting up 6 screens. It takes the stress out of explaining how we cannot fit your over sized back logo for adult sizes on your youth extra smalls, now we just tell them we can print them DTG, that has been very successful for us. I didn't even touch upon the niche we have with pin flag printing, we have a source for excellent made flags that print DTG excellent, our flags are on TV quite often. Coasters crap we printed thousands of them already with no end in site.

every day....anyone who says different is trying to feel better about their DTG purchase.  Deep down you know that one off shit is a giant PITA. 

Sure if your a dumb ass and do not know how to schedule your work, in our shop we schedule runs together, we may not fire up for two or three days but when we do we pump out a bunch of jobs, three or four simple one offs can be a c note for ten minutes of work, and thats not including the other more substantial orders you are running that day.

"As for the White the little I have heard is promising, much less issues than epson converts but still struggles with the fundamental issues of white ink. Bigger print heads does equal less clogging."

Hey Mike, do you have your brother set up for darks? Or are you doing light colors only?

I found out that it works a little different for Brother, disregard the last question.....

Nice opinions Clark but you shouldn't assume for everyone if you do not what or how everyone is doing with their machines.

As I stated in my post we never bought one to make any real money off of, it is a support piece that complements our decorating abilities, it takes a certain amount of stress of when we have to do a repeat order and all we have to do is fire up the heat press instead of setting up 6 screens. It takes the stress out of explaining how we cannot fit your over sized back logo for adult sizes on your youth extra smalls, now we just tell them we can print them DTG, that has been very successful for us. I didn't even touch upon the niche we have with pin flag printing, we have a source for excellent made flags that print DTG excellent, our flags are on TV quite often. Coasters crap we printed thousands of them already with no end in site.

Sure if your a dumb ass and do not know how to schedule your work, in our shop we schedule runs together, we may not fire up for two or three days but when we do we pump out a bunch of jobs, three or four simple one offs can be a c note for ten minutes of work, and that's not including the other more substantial orders you are running that day.

Ink, glad you said this first. 

My Brother GT541 runs every day along side my embroidery machines.  can i do darks?  nope.  nor do i want to.  to much time involved in darks.

Do i believe any business can solely function on just DTG?  no.  I haven't seen a model yet that can.  However, in my shop, the Brother holds it's own.  I believe DTG compliments existing business models.

I also don't get why companies still utilize the Epson print head.  It has been a nightmare to use for white inks since the first machine rolled off the assembly line.  my guess would be cost since developing your own print head and producing the print head would make the machine more expensive than the target market would spend.  Just a theory....

Konit and Brother have developed their own print heads and the machines were WOW expensive.  Konit has it's own issues but i never saw clogging heads as one listed.  The Brother 721 seems to be rolling along like the 541.  I have spoke to a couple of people who made the purchase and they seem happy.  Still have the whole pretreat ordeal which slows production but no clogged heads.

When DuPont stepped into the ink game a few years ago, my hopes were raised quite a bit.  (to be honest, i had high hopes)  i figured if a big dog like DuPont was stepping in, the white ink issue would be taken care of.  It did improve but the problem still exists. 

I just replaced the first head in my Brother.  Over 30,000 prints, 0 downtime, 0 maintenance problems, runs daily without question.  At $15 a shirt average, it's more than paid for itself a long time ago.  I believe Brad at Repla Prints has had similar success with his machines.

Sam at Palomar is a good example of an I-dot complimenting his business.  He understands the machine and takes care of it as directed.  However, he also understands the time and cost involved and charges properly.   I havent heard of him folding to the "but i only have $x.xx to spend" just to produce a shirt which is one thing that DTG'ers tend to do from what I've experienced.

Will DTG take over the world, maybe one day.  Not today, not tomorrow, not in it's current form or current technology.

Hey Ink, you gotta tell me about these flags! 

Ok here it goes...

We got the dtg about 3 yrs ago...we have the IDOT...we did so because we have a retail store and after doing a study of about 6 months we realized we were losing money not taking those 1-23 shirt orders...so after speaking with many many people in the industry we chose to get into the dtg market and offer that service...at the same time we opted to also get an online designer for designing shirts.  with that now when someone comes into the store we can basically kick them out with a 10% card for placing their order online...this saves us in customer service time, we get paid right away and they also feel "part of the process"  so far it has worked really really well.  but again this is an add on to our business...Like Brad we have an auto, manual and multiple heads of emb...we also do banners and asi stuff....so it really fits our business model well...will it work for everyone NO...but does it have it place yes....I think the worse thing was people thought these machines were plug and play....they are not..they need maintenance and with white ink they need more...

Will DTG take over screen printing no way...not in this lifetime...i know we just did 15 shirts on black on the dtg and we printed over 300 on the auto before the first 7 were done....there is your answer...it is like running a single head emb machine...

that is my take...

Sam

Most importantly the thing you cannot measure is what stress did it take off our staff? What new jobs and contacts did it bring into our business? Thats where we believe the machine really paid for itself.

No kidding on THAT one.  We start a lot of customers off with digital and work them into screen printing on other jobs.  It just works great to be able to offer everything.

What is keeping me away from the GT782 is the price.  I can't spend that on a digital printer right now, I could spend that on an awesome press with all the features.

It's just my opinion, I haven't seen any at the shows that look worth the money, or the time spent to make it worth while.  I clearly said there are people making money with the DTG, but IMHO, it is the ones that are taking the human element out of the equation and using the interwebs to conduct business that are the one REALLY making money with DTG. I don't doubt you can make a C-Note in ten minutes, I also know for a fact you can quote a one-off job and then have to spend an hour with the customer afterwords discussing all the crap he wants done to the design, basically draining your profit.  Some will say you charge for art too, and some people will pay a $50 art charge and $30 for the one shirt....that's fine, but I don't believe there is a sustainable market for this type of work. 

Not to mention that this mediocre technology does nothing but further the idea by the average customer that all you have to do is push a button and some machine poops out a printed shirt.  Couple that with ginormous ink costs, downtime from printer problems, and dealing with the type of customers that generally want short run jobs and IMHO, we have a long ways to go before it is a legitimate printing process that is ready to take over the world like some think...

When I was looking into the t-jet years ago, I decided my time was better spent listing clients I would like to go and get for screen printing and embroidery work and then going and getting them rather than sitting around doing head cleanings and talking to tech support all day.

If you're making money at it, great.  Alan asked the state of DTG, and thats my opinion on it.