DTG (Direct-to-Garment) Printing

DTG, or Direct-to-Garment, printing loads a shirt onto a flat platen and sprays ink through inkjet printheads straight onto the fabric's surface, the same basic technology as a desktop photo printer scaled up for apparel. Cotton first gets a pretreatment solution to keep the ink from wicking too deep into the fibers, a quick pre-cure, then a CMYK image plus a white underbase lays down over it, followed by a heat cure around 320°F to set the ink permanently.

We've turned around a one-off DTG shirt for a customer's birthday photo the same afternoon a screen-printed order would still be waiting on film and a screen burn. It's the go-to for full-color, photographic, or gradient-heavy art on 100% cotton tees like a Bella+Canvas 3001's 4.2-ounce combed cotton, with no screen charges and no color-count penalty, print one shirt or fifty at essentially the same per-unit cost.

Ringspun or combed cotton, and high-cotton blends, take the pretreatment and ink best; pure polyester resists both. DTG wins on cost under roughly two to four dozen pieces, since there's no setup fee to spread across units, but screen printing usually pulls ahead on price per shirt once an order climbs into the hundreds.

Buyers occasionally ask for DTG on a 100% polyester jersey or a dark poly-blend hoodie expecting the same vivid, soft-hand result they've seen on a cotton tee. The pretreatment and ink aren't built to bond to synthetic fiber the way they do to cotton, and DTF is almost always the better-suited process for that fabric instead.