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Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1)
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Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1)
This Episode
Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila
You Will Learn
- How much t-shirt printing equipment cost
Resources & Links
Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1)
Show Notes
That machine is WAY too expensive.
Why would I buy that when a cricut can do the same thing?
It only cost that much to own a business? I thought it was so much more.
What is the best t-shirt printer?
These are the comments you will read on social media posts about the t-shirt business. As you can see, there are assumptions people are making or just a lack of in depth knowledge about the t-shirt printing business.
In this episode we are going to jump into .. what does t-shirt printing equipment cost?
This episode was inspired by an article, on ColDesi… which was inspired by the questions and comments from people above. (Click here to read the article)
Keep in mind all of these prices and estimated financing costs are as of when we wrote this podcast and probably will change over time. However, for the time being we can assume all of this data will still be reasonably accurate for some time.
Heat Transfer Vinyl
Brands
- Graphtec
- Roland
Cost
- Starting around $2400 or about $65 a month
Pros
- One of the easiest to learn / simplest machines
- Very versatile – lights, darks, cotton, poly, stickers, t-shirts, signs
- Little-to-no maintenance
- Nice quality finished goods
- 10x faster than a cricut / hobby cutter
Cons
- You aren’t digital printing
- Storing and investing in rolls of material
- Range of production speed varies a lot (1 color, simple design VS 4 color complex design)
Sublimation
Brand: Sawgrass
- SG1000
- SG500
Cost
- $600 – $6000 or $45 – $165 financed
Pros
- Relatively easy to learn
- Extremely versatile
- Finished print is now “a part of” the t-shirt (or mug or mousepad or totebag)
Cons
- Only meant for white / light colored items
- Polyester or sublimation coated items only
- Ink systems require some maintenance
- Ink can get expensive over time
Print & Cut
Brand: Roland
- BN-20
- BN-20A
Cost
- $6000 – $8000 or starting about $165 a month financed
Pros
- Full Digital Prints
- Very versatile – t-shirts to signs to window clings to car decals
- Can do the same as a vinyl cutter above, but can also print
- BIG prints about 20″ x HUGE
- Versatile – lights, darks, cotton, poly
Cons
- Ink and Printable vinyl has a higher supply cost than other methods
- Can be considered slow when compared
- Requires a bit more graphics knowledge to set up prints and cuts
White Toner Transfer Printers
Brand: DigitalHeat FX
- Uninet & Crio
- i560, 8432wt, i650, 9541wt
Cost
- $3700 – $15000 or about $100 – $400 a month
Pros
- Full color digital prints
- Very fast print time
- Little-to-no maintenance
- Versatile lights, darks, cotton, poly.
- Can be used on hard good with no special coatings required
Cons
- More precise learning process, requires practice
- Toner and transfer paper is not as soft as alternatives like DTG, Sublimation, DTF
- Cost per print higher than other methods like DTG or DTF
Direct to Garment Printing
Brand: DTG
Cost
- $15000 – $24000 or about $350 – $600 a month financed
Pros
- Amazing colors and full digital prints
- Washes and wears beautifully
- No transfer required, more details
- Low cost per print
Cons
- Light colors – cotton & poly – Darks – Best for cotton only
- Liquid ink systems requires maintenance
- Good knowledge of graphics really helps to get the best prints
DTF – Direct to Film
Brands: DTF / Coldesi – DigitalHeat FX
Cost
- Still a growing field of printers but right now about $25k or $690 a month financed.
Pros
- Amazing quality digital prints
- Wears, washes and looks great
- Super fast
- Very low supply cost
Cons
- Liquid and film system requires maintenance
- Initial cost to invest is one of the highest
- It’s bigger and louder than anything on the list
Hopefully this information helps you to understand what it costs to invest in a t-shirt printing system and which one is best for you. Be sure to click the link and read the article for more information: How Much Does It Cost? Comparing Pricing and Payments on Custom T-Shirt Printing Equipment – ColDesi
Transcript:
Mark Stephenson:
Hey Everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.
Marc Vila:
This is Marc Vila. Today, we’re going to talk about how much does it cost, a 2022 T-shirt printer options buying guide of sorts.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. I like all that.
Marc Vila:
This is kind of what the world we live in marketing and talking about T-shirt printers with folks online. We hear, how much does it cost to start a T-shirt printing business? Wow. That machine’s way too expensive.
Mark Stephenson:
No matter what machine it is.
Marc Vila:
No matter what machine it is. Or the other way. Wow. It’s only that much? I thought I was going to be so much more.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Not very often.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Why would I buy this printer when my Cricut can do the same thing?
Mark Stephenson:
Right. That’s never true.
Marc Vila:
Or what’s the best T-shirt? What was that?
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Which is never true.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Which is never true. What’s the best T-shirt printer. This is the things that we run into online. When we’re talking to folks on social media or answering questions online, or when people call in, they ask this stuff and it really inspired this episode that we should kind of have a one and tell all about all the different printers and what do they cost and maybe some pros and cons.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think ColDesi in a unique position in the marketplace to do this too, because we get so many of these kinds of questions because we sell them all. Because we deal with all of the technologies, direct to garment printing, and DTF and white toner, and sublimation, transfers and vinyl, print and cut. There’s really not much that we don’t do so we’ve got something in every piece of the market and can really do a good job of maybe helping you walk through and fitting your application to how much you have to spend. Or changing how much you have to spend to fit your application.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. This is something that I know I’ve said 100 times maybe, or maybe not on the podcast, probably, but in real life, I say it almost every day, is that there just isn’t a best way to print T-shirts just like there isn’t a best car. The classic example I say is, what do you mean? A sports car versus a pickup truck. They are very, very different, very, very amazing vehicles. But if you have a roofing company, they it’s different than if you are retiring on the beach. Two different things you want to own. I think we could just start to go into some of the different technologies.
Marc Vila:
In each technology that we have at ColDesi, we’ll talk about what equipment we sell, about how much it costs, a little bit about financing it, about how much it costs for a monthly payment and then a little bit of a pro and con. This isn’t every single piece of information. This is a little snippet. Then the one caveat we have to say is, is that the prices and technology and offering that we’re talking about is what’s available at the time when we wrote this podcast.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Thanks for that because we kind of based this on an article. That we got the idea from an article that we did. I think Marc Vila probably did it.
Marc Vila:
I don’t know if I did.
Mark Stephenson:
About a survey of, we did best T-shirt printers for you. We noticed a couple things as soon as we opened it up. The article was six months old, so some of the pricing in it was wrong. It was just before we came out with the high volume direct to film printer, so a significant piece of technology was missing. When we do these podcasts, when we write content for websites, and this goes for anybody, it’s really time dependent and you should realize that if you … For example, price on one of the products in the article had gone up, price on DTG printers had come down a little bit. You should always realize that when you look at an article, as opposed to an e-commerce site, like Colman and Company, where you can buy supplies and machines directly online, that there’s going to be some variability. We tried to do a range in this podcast, which still may or may be true by the time you listen to it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. But I do feel confident that this will give you an overall picture of what you’re looking at. It’s a snapshot of today in the beginning of 2022, when this podcast was done. If you’re listening to this in the year 2032, 10 years from now, for one, thank you. Thank you for listening.
Mark Stephenson:
Thanks for still having that antique podcast playing device.
Marc Vila:
A lot of this stuff might change. But jokingly, realistically, I mean, all year, this is going to be pretty darn close, I would say. Even through next year, it’ll be pretty darn close, and there may even be some more options that we’ll have. In all, listen to this podcast, learn some good stuff, get some good questions, write them down. I like to talk about doing homework. The best homework you could do is when you hear us talk about something or you find something interesting, write it down, make a note. Then when it’s time for you to talk to one of the pros at ColDesi, then you’ll have some questions to ask. You can just say, “Hey, I was listening to the podcast. They talked about this. What do you think?” They’ll keep you informed on what’s up to date. Let’s go ahead and let’s get into one.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. The first one you’ve got down here, and this isn’t necessarily all lowest cost to highest cost, but definitely getting into heat transfer vinyl is one of the most economical ways to start in custom apparel or customization of a lot of things. If you’re not familiar with it, if you’ve never seen a cutter before, as far as you know, if you think of Cricut, which is the most popular brand, basically all vinyl cutters do pretty much the same thing. You put, in our case, a heat transfer vinyl into a machine. You send a design to it and then the machine cuts out the outline of the design in the vinyl. Whether it’s a sheet or a roll. Then after it comes out, then you use some kind of a tool or your fingers to peel it off and you then heat press that onto a garment or onto some kind of a hard good. Does that sum it up, Marc?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I think it’s great. I mean, it’s like a computer controlled razor blade.
Mark Stephenson:
I like that.
Marc Vila:
It is what it is. I-
Mark Stephenson:
You just said what I said, only mine took 20 minutes and yours took five.
Marc Vila:
You’ve taught me how to do that, Mark. That’s you. You’ve taught me how to do that.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s great.
Marc Vila:
At ColDesi, we carry, one would debate, the two top brands. The [crosstalk 00:07:22]-
Mark Stephenson:
Well, they are the two top brands of commercial business oriented.
Marc Vila:
Commercial. You mentioned the Cricut earlier and then the Silhouette would be another, and there’s other generic hobby cutters out there that you can buy at Walmart or Michaels or Jo-Anns or any places like that. Those are fun and cool toys for the hobbyist. But when you want to do something commercial, you want to step up to a commercial piece of equipment. For one, they’re designed to run all day and they’re significantly faster and the materials are significantly cheaper, and it’s a way to run a business.
Mark Stephenson:
I think that’s two things you just said. Is the commercial cutters are larger, so they’ll hold wider rolls of material. Just in that, you pay less for every shirt you make, so you’ll make more profit. It’s significantly faster. You can do more designs for hour, which means you’re working less to produce the same amount of work. You get three different ways to make more profit just because you’re using a commercial heat transfer vinyl cutter versus a consumer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. We kind of estimated a cost of a cutting system to start around $2,500. Honestly, that’s not the low end of the price because you could probably just get a cutter for less than $1,500 or around that delivered. But we try to be realistic to say, you’re going to need some vinyl, you’re going to need some papers and materials. You may or may not need a heat press, which can bump that number up a bit more, but around 24, $2,500 is a reasonable way to say you could probably get started there.
Mark Stephenson:
Marc, I know that something like the Cricut is 12 inches.
Marc Vila:
I believe it is. [crosstalk 00:09:28]-
Mark Stephenson:
12 inches. What would an entry level commercial cutter start at? What size?
Marc Vila:
In size?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Cutters are generally going to be, if we’re talking about entry level style, because they go huge … You can buy a cutter that’s wider than your house.
Mark Stephenson:
As big as your house basically.
Marc Vila:
Right. But that’s probably not what most businesses are going to get into. Most are going to get into a 15 or a 20 inch cutter. That’s the width. The great thing about these cutters is, it’s not just the width, but it’s the length. These things can cut six feet or 18 feet long worth of material.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. That’s as opposed to a Silhouette or a Cricut where typically you’re feeding in a sheet at a time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A 12 by 12 [crosstalk 00:10:19]-
Mark Stephenson:
You’re doing one shirt front design, and then you’re printing another one, and then you’re printing another one. Where you can set a commercial cutter to print 57 of these things.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. On repeat.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It’ll just spit them right out.
Marc Vila:
All types of other things to help automate it. Like pause after every one until you hit a button. Or eject the paper or the vinyl material out 2.25 inches so you can cut it off with a razor blade and then start again, and copy and repeat functions. But anyway, tons of more stuff not worth getting into, but they can do a lot.
Mark Stephenson:
I think one thing that you wrote down here, that even at the commercial level you can start doing financing for these. You can start paying by the month. From a cash basis they can seem less expensive if you’re in business than even buying a Cricut. Because if you’re spending, let’s say … I’m just trying to do a little math here. You could spend 60 bucks a month, 80 bucks a month and get a complete commercial cutter setup as opposed to having to write a check for 800 bucks for one of the hiring Cricuts.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You could cancel Netflix and go to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts twice a month less and get one of these.
Mark Stephenson:
Marc, neither one of those is on the table. Not for anybody. There’s nobody that would give up Netflix to start a business. That’s just not-
Marc Vila:
If you do it-
Mark Stephenson:
I’m right in the middle of Reacher. I don’t know what I would do.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, something out there. There’s a subscription you can cancel. But it is affordable, which is great. That’s what I love them.
Mark Stephenson:
You can still get the newspaper and do that. [crosstalk 00:12:11]-
Marc Vila:
Let’s talk about some pros and cons. Go ahead.
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, you’re the cutter guy. I mean, I know that these things are just really simple to learn. The software is simple. One of the reasons that it’s simple is because you’re not dealing with photos or full color. You’re really just talking about outlines. You’re talking about doing the lines, so you don’t have to worry about color correction or what color it prints or anything like that. It’s a simple design process.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Any system that exists, period, whether it’s a phone or a hammer or a cutter, the simpler the system, the easier it is to learn to use, the less likely it is to break. It’s just easier in general. A hammer, you may still have your dad’s hammer from the ’40s or the ’50s or the ’60s and it still works. But you probably don’t have someone’s cell phone from the ’90s.
Mark Stephenson:
If your dad was using a hammer in the ’60s, that means you’re probably a millennial. You don’t know how to use a hammer. You don’t know what that’s all about.
Marc Vila:
Whatever it might be, it’s a simpler system to do. It’s a razor blade with a computer.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You know what?
Marc Vila:
There’s less things to learn.
Mark Stephenson:
You know what I really love about it though, is that the output is so good. It’s really an amazing quality if you use a good quality heat transfer vinyl. You can tell because if you buy the stuff from Michaels or from Target or wherever you get it locally, it’s pretty thick. When you put it onto a garment, it feels like you’ve got something there. It feels a little crunchy. But if you use a good brand, then it hardly feels like it’s there.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s really thin. The adhesive that’s on the back is really lightweight. The material is really thin. They’re made out of polyurethane type materials that have a lot of stretch that stick to shirts really well and they’re beautiful. We have our Triton brand-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Which is great.
Marc Vila:
… a heat transfer vinyl. Which is just so nice. That’s definitely an upgrade when you get into the commercials, being able to use materials like that. But-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’ll also say one that we didn’t mention here as far as pros go, is there’s really almost no limit to how big a design you can do. If you’re going to do numbers on the back of a shirt, it’s a great idea to do that in vinyl. If you wanted to do a design all the way down a table runner and you don’t mind putting each piece through your heat press, then you can print out a single design as long as you want to on vinyl. That’s how they do banners in some cases. You can do all that with a commercial cutter as well.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s a great point and it just points to a lot of this is about versatility and quality. Cutting and cutters in general and using materials, it’s just extremely versatile. You can go on almost any shirt. It doesn’t matter the color or the material. You can also do signs and stickers and wall stickers and commercial signs for windows and car decals. They are just extremely versatile. There’s tons of different materials you can buy from metallics to glitter, to T-shirt stuff, to sticker stuff. Just the versatility’s amazing on a cutter. They’re simple to learn, and then topping that all off because of this simplicity, there’s not much maintenance you have to do. There’s little to no maintenance and you get a great finished good. Overall, I mean, the pros are super nice for a cutter.
Mark Stephenson:
I’d say this is the one device that I don’t care which kind of apparel decoration business that you’re in or what equipment you already have, you should probably have a cutter. You know what I mean? It is such a Swiss Army Knife. It can fill in a pinch. It’ll do things that some of these other devices won’t do. It’s up and running constantly. You don’t have to do maintenance. You can train somebody to use it very quickly. It’s just you should have one. This is a good one.
Marc Vila:
You know what’s great about it? It made me think about it. That one of the first tools you can get for your child, maybe as they get older, it might be a little handheld multi tool. Because it’s got pliers on it and a screw driver and a knife and some stuff like that. It’s just a great starter tool because it’s small, it’s not expensive, it’s not a big investment and it does a whole bunch of stuff. If it’s a nice quality one-
Mark Stephenson:
It’ll last forever.
Marc Vila:
… you’ll last use it. Yeah, it’ll last forever. You’ll still use it. Even when you have a full toolbox, which I have, I have tons of tools, I use my multi tool all the time that I’ve had for 20 years. I still use it. That’s what the cutter really is. It’s a great multi tool. It’s not a huge investment, great output. But there are some cons. We might as well bring them up.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I would say probably the big … Now these are cons that if this is the only thing you have to run your business. If this is your business, then probably the biggest con is, everyone that you do a shirt for with heat transfer vinyl, from a Graphtec or a roll and cutter, is going to ask you if you can do a picture or more colors. They’re always going to ask, “Hey, that looks great. Can I get this 17 color logo for my business? Can I get that?” Or, “Can I get a picture of my kid on this coffee mug?” The answer’s going to be no because it’s not a full colored digital device.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s not digital printing, which is great for its simplicity, but you do lose out on a feature that is something a lot of people want. Digital is huge nowadays. The other thing is, because you’re cutting rolled material, you’re going to have stacks and piles and boxes of rolled material that you accumulate and have to invest in. They take up space. If you have a new customer that wants golden blue, and you’ve never done golden blue before, you may have to buy two rolls of material that might cost 60, 70 bucks or something like that. The order that you’re doing may just pay for the material. Now, it’s in your inventory and hopefully you can sell that later, but that can be a con of this. Is that now you’ve got this color gold and it takes up space. I mean, they take up some space. These are going to be 15 inch-
Mark Stephenson:
It happens in the Colman and Company warehouse.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It takes up a lot of space.
Mark Stephenson:
We have tons of space full of all the colors that you might want.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, exactly. That is a downside. Then the other downside, which is a little more complicated to say, so hopefully in a simple way, but the range of production speed varies a ton. What mean by that is, if you have a small logo that’s one color and it’s very simple design, McDonald’s M, I mean, you could do a ton of those shirts in an hour. A ton. Fast, easy, one color. The process where you’re weeding or removing out the material you don’t want is going to be one simple pull, one simple swipe because it’s easy. Now, if you want to comparatively do something a much more complicated logo where that’s maybe four colors and it’s got lots of lettering in it, maybe just a home improvement type of company, then you might find that producing that same logo might not be four times slower. It could be 10 times slower.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Because you’ve got to weed out the windows on the house, that kind of thing. You got to do that.
Marc Vila:
It’s four colors, so you’re cutting four different colors and you’re lining up the four different colors once they’re all cut out and done. The scale of the speed can be faster than any other technology or significantly slower than any other technology. That’s a little bit of a con because you do have to understand managing that and understanding that. It’s a little bit of a complex con, but it’s really important, I think, compared to other types of printing. Where it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s pretty much all the same speed.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. There you go. Okay. I think that’s good. I think they’ve got a good idea of heat transfer vinyl. The price, you’re going to start around 2,400 bucks. You can get just the cutter for much less, but you’re going to need more than just that.
Marc Vila:
Yes. Everything you need more than just that. But hopefully that that’s, and it’s something we don’t have to say, but with everything in life, you always got to buy an accessory for it and sometimes you need them.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s funny. I love the chats we get on ColDesi because if you’re in Facebook and you see an ad for Digital HeatFX, then, and we’re going to talk about white toner printing soon, you know that if somebody says, how much is that printer? You know that you have four printer choices. Each one of those four printers has three bundles, a good, better, best bundle each. That’s 12 different decisions to make and there are, of course, options within that if you want to do hats and things like that. When you go to the ColDesi Facebook page and you say, how much is that printer? Then you get all of the Digital HeatFX and DTG, the four UV printers, the DTF printer. I mean, it’s just it’s compounded. The answer to what that price is that we’re going to talk about through here and the questions that we get about how much something is going, I’m reminded about how excited I am to get this out. Because now I’m just going to send a link to the podcast.
Marc Vila:
No, that’s great. We’re going to do sublimation next, but before we do it, you reminded me of something that just should be said out loud. Because every once in a while, we’ll get somebody and just today actually, I was asked to update a product page because some people had thought that it was unfair to just show the price of the printer when they need more things. That’s a rock and a hard place thing because people want to know how much the printer costs because that’s an essential question. What does this one device cost? But you need other things. I mean, I would have guessed if you go and buy a digital camera, you need a memory card, you need a case, you probably need a tripod, you might need additional lenses. It’s not uncommon in our world that when you buy something you might … Your iPhone doesn’t even come with a power plug anymore.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Good point.
Marc Vila:
You can’t even charge it. You literally can’t charge an iPhone that you buy.
Mark Stephenson:
But you can buy the phone for that price.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a bit of a nature of the world, but devices, a lot of things are sold independently now. We have a printer and a price for all of this stuff, but everything we recommend a bundle or a package that includes multiple things. Having said that out loud, let’s talk about sublimation.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Let’s do that because it’s really inexpensive.
Marc Vila:
Great. We love that.
Mark Stephenson:
You get to do full color.
Marc Vila:
Well, we love that too. We’re already getting into pros. Let’s start off with-
Mark Stephenson:
I know. Well, I mean …
Marc Vila:
First of all, we’ll start with that, at ColDesi, we have the Sawgrass brand printers, which currently are the SG500 and the SG1000. It’s just a size difference in how big they are. They both do similar things. The price range for sublimation packages, we’re going to say for 600 if you just buy a printer up to 6,000, if you buy the biggest one they have, and then a bunch of prices in between of packages.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. The other thing I’ll say is, we chose the Sawgrass brand for a reason, just like with Roland and Graphtec. One of the reasons we chose Sawgrass is because they’ve got very good training that the manufacturer does, which is great. Unlike a lot of other manufacturers, Sawgrass is putting this product and the ink and everything together into one package. They’re not selling you an Epson printer and then you go and source the sublimation ink, and then you’re not doing your own work to make this printer work. It’s a great deal. It’s a nice little package and it does a ton for anywhere between 60 and $6,000.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a purpose built system, so the whole thing is designed just for sublimation. They’ve got a great reputation and we could probably attest to that ourselves because a ton of customers out there using Sawgrass printers love them. It’s a great product. Some of the pros of the Sawgrass sublimation printers, I would say they’re also relatively easy to learn. It’s relatively easy to learn. You’re just printing with CMYK. It’s essentially the same as any home printer you’ve ever used in how you print.
Mark Stephenson:
Let me interrupt you here because I want to differentiate between saying that the cutter software is easy to learn and it’s easy to learn to use the Sawgrass systems. That there’s some fundamental complexities in Sawgrass because now you’re dealing with full color. It’s definitely going to be more complicated than using a cutter because you’ve got different colors. You’re going to take a picture with your phone. You’re going to put it on the computer. It may not look the same. You’re going to want to remove things out of the picture. Your customers are going to want to do this. It’s a great product. The software is easy to use compared to a lot of other full color printers. It’s just different than using a cutter. [crosstalk 00:27:01]-
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You bring up a good point and it’s an answer that can be mildly complicated, but it’s important to understand. If somebody sends you the McDonald’s logo because you get McDonald’s as a client, how wonderful is that? [crosstalk 00:27:23]-
Mark Stephenson:
That’s the only way, by the way, you should be printing the McDonald’s logo.
Marc Vila:
Yes. But it’s an M. To print that in the Sawgrass or in the Graphtec is probably going to be the same amount of work relatively. There’s some things you have to learn. I’m just saying that. You don’t know how to do it now, listening to it if you haven’t used these. You have to learn things, but relatively easy to use. If somebody sends you a picture of their dog and they say, “Can you print exactly this?” The Sawgrass is probably going to be pretty easy to do, because you can bring it in and print it and you’ll get a print and you can print exactly what they gave you.
Marc Vila:
If you wanted to cut out an image of the dog, like Hannah did a great video where she converted a picture of her dog into a cuttable kind of 2D shape, that’s hard to do. There’s a little bit of a give and take, back and forth here on the ease of use. A little bit of a depends. But to your point, you are doing full colors now, so there’s another degree of complexity that happens. Because when you print that image of the dog and then you put it on a shirt, it might not come out the way the customer was hoping it would. Because they saw it on the phone.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You might end up with a picture of a beige retriever.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or just there was a flash and there’s a hotspot of a flash that shows up, so part of the dog’s face looks empty or missing. Then that means you’re learning graphics a little bit. You’re learning how to edit photos. There’s a little bit of complexity there and a little bit of a depends. But I would still say relatively easy to learn and use.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Also, it brings up a good point. When you buy a printing device from ColDesi, we typically provide you training on how to use it and it’s normally very good. We do not provide training on how to create the graphics. That part, none of these devices come with every picture you would want to print built into the printer. You do have to arrange to get graphics done. You have to do it yourself, or you have to get it from your customer. The Sawgrass and sublimation printing is pretty forgiving and it’s very simple to use, but it will not do a design on your behalf. None of these things will.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, exactly. Everything’s got a learning curve. But the pros of sublimation are really just, they’re beautiful. You get a great finished product. I think that kind of just wraps it up. Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
You can’t understate that. You can get a beautiful print from sublimation.
Marc Vila:
You just get an amazing finished product and it becomes a part of it, literally. Well, that’s kind of the nature of sublimation, is you’re physically changing the properties of whatever you’re making, like a T-shirt. You’ve now physically changed the shirt. You didn’t glue something on top of it or stick something on top, like with vinyl. You’ve actually changed to the shirt and it’s going to feel good, it’s going to wash good. The same is true from mugs and all these other things.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That is the versatility is one of the pluses because a lot of promotional products that you might buy or you might steal off somebody’s table at a trade show, the key chain, the coffee mug things like that, they’re frequently done with sublimation and they hold up great. You’re already not only in the custom T-shirt business, if you’re willing to spend the money on an alternative heat press, you could be in the custom hat business and the custom mug business and all of that stuff.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great and I love this stuff. It’s great technology, great value. There are some cons to it too.
Mark Stephenson:
These are bummers.
Marc Vila:
Bummers.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s a bummer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s a bummer.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s a bummer that you can only print on light colored items like on whites. Like on this shirt that I’m wearing here, this dark gray, you’re never going to use sublimation on it.
Marc Vila:
No. This is a light green that I’m wearing. If I wanted to do a black logo on here, I could probably sublimate this, but that’s just about it. I’m not going to get any colors on this. I’m not going to be able to do any reds or yellows or light blues or purples, anything like that. The green is going to change it. It’s pretty limited, but you can do some light colors. But really you’re going to be limited to light colors and then polyester or sublimation coated items. The item has to be available to sublimate, which is not a cotton T-shirt and it’s not a piece of wood that you purchased from the craft store. It has to be a special item.
Mark Stephenson:
The polyester really, the more it is 100% polyester, the better it’s going to look and the better it’s going to be react. Just and the darker a shirt gets, the sublimation doesn’t have white ink, so whatever you put it on, whatever you put that sublimation transfer on, the color of the item, you’re pressing it to impacts the color of the design. Let’s say, you’re going to do an American flag print and you’re going to do that. If you did it on a bright white, 100% polyester shirt, it’s going to look amazing. It’s really going to pop.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Beautiful.
Mark Stephenson:
If you do it on a tri-blend light colored shirt, it’ll probably be muted. It’ll probably be pretty muted. If you did it on a black, cotton shirt, it’s going to look terrible.
Marc Vila:
Invisible. Relatively invisible. Then speaking of just printing and inks and stuff like that, we’re now into a liquid based system, so we have liquid inks. If you’ve owned a printer before, you know that printers just require a little bit of TLC. You got to keep it clean. You want to keep it on and plugged in so it can do some self-cleaning. If you don’t use it in a long time, you may need to do cleaning cycles, which uses ink and things like that. You do now have cartridges to replace. With the cutter, you were just replacing a blade that lasts pretty darn long. With this, you’re going to be running out of ink and colors and you want to make sure that you have ink in stock. That’s a bit of a pro too, because you need four colors of ink to do all your colors. Your inventory is four items.
Mark Stephenson:
You’re not doing one color at a time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. But there is a little bit of maintenance to be had now. You’re getting into a complicated.
Mark Stephenson:
I think it’s good that you pointed out that anytime you have liquid ink, it’s very much kind of like running an engine on your lawnmower or snowblower or anything that requires pretty regular maintenance. It requires you to take care of it or it gets sludgy. I think that’s the technical term that supports used if you don’t maintain, slugginess. You got to take care of it. Where with cutter, that’s not true.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A cutter, you just stick it under your desk and you don’t use it in forever and then you turn it back on one day and use it. If you did that with a printer you’d ruin it.
Mark Stephenson:
With an ink or an inkjet printer.
Marc Vila:
An ink or an inkjet printer. A liquid ink system.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. There you go.
Marc Vila:
Speaking of liquid ink systems, let’s move on to the next one which is a hybrid of printing and cutting, print and cut systems. We have the Roland brand, which is just considered to be the best out there. A lot of people agree, the BN20 and the newer BN20a. This is a system that is like your cutter that we mentioned earlier, but it’s got a printer built into it as well. You can print onto a material, and then that will go back into the machine and cut your print and your shape out where you can make T-shirts or sticker or anything you like in whatever shape you want it to.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That’s a great description. Imagine your Cricut, if it could hold a 20 inch roll of vinyl and had a professional in inkjet printer bolted to the side. Because what it does is, it actually, it’ll take that picture, excuse me, of the beige retriever that you were printing out on the-
Marc Vila:
The sublimation.
Mark Stephenson:
On the sublimation printer. It’s going to print that out onto a white vinyl. You’re using the white vinyl as a substitute for white ink, and it’s cutting that design out like a cutter does. You end up with something that is incredibly versatile. That looks fantastic. I’m really impressed with the look on one of these Roland BN20 systems.
Marc Vila:
It’s a beautiful system. The cost of this system is about six to $8,000 ish. About $165 a month financed, and give or take. You may or may not need a heat press depending on what you’re going to do with the printer. Or you may already own one on whatever [crosstalk 00:37:10]-
Mark Stephenson:
You can have terrible credit and it’ll be $500 or something like that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of factors. There’s a lot of factors. But there is financing available and it’s about six to $8,000. It’s a very popular system. Tons of people have it and the reason they do is because of these pros. We’ve got a full digital printing capability, so hundreds of thousands of colors or whatever it might be. You can print full pictures. It’s really versatile. You can print a picture of a dog on a T-shirt, then a picture of a dog for a sticker for a wall, and then for a window cling and then for a car decal. You can go from signs, to banners, to T-shirts, to stickers to put on a laptop. It’s a beautifully versatile machine.
Mark Stephenson:
It does a lot.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it does a lot. It does everything your cutter, mentioned before, will do. You can buy the metallic gold material that your customer wanted and you can just cut it out just like you could with your cutter and not print anything on it. It’s still a cutter too, which is great. It’s a bit of a two in one almost type of machine. This is a 20 inch wide, the BN20a. You can print 20 inches wide and then just a huge long role, like you mentioned earlier in cutting. I mean, the size, especially if you piece things together, you can go huge with this stuff. [crosstalk 00:38:43]-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’d say that a lot of our, or not a lot, many customers that have the BN20, just use it for banners. I mean, they’re actually printing banners for different things or there’s some that just are in the window cling business, wine bottle labels. There’s tons of applications for it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a great for making packages for a company. We did a brewery video, kind of a mock brewery. We did stickers that went on glasses and sticker to hand out to customers and a sign for the door and a window cling and T-shirts and aprons. You can do a lot of stuff with this one printer and it does beautifully. It’s versatile, light colors, dark colors, cotton, polyester, just like the vinyl.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If your question is, why should I get a BN20 instead of one of the Sawgrass sublimation printers, then it’s, well, I can print out beautiful color images and I can pretty much put them on whatever I want to without restriction to material? Why would I get it versus one of the Roland or Graphtec cutters? It’s so I can do full color and it’s a bigger cutter.
Marc Vila:
Yep. No, it was not just one color at a time. It’s as many colors you want at once.
Mark Stephenson:
I know we’re going to get to the cons, but I just want to point out here that this is where the financing payments start to strike me a little bit. Because we’re talking about 165 bucks or so for the Roland And it was … How much? $65 for the Graphtec. Something along those lines. Really you’re talking about $100 a month. The difference between something that is bigger and will give you full color and the ability to do a lot more things. It starts to get striking. If you’re out there and you’re thinking about messaging us or calling ColDesi and saying, “How much is the printer?” You should probably add, how much is it a month because that’s an important calculation too.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, if you’re going to start a business and you’re going to get a website and pay your fees to the state and all these other little fees you’re going to pay to start a business, you’ll spend more than you would on a monthly payment on one of these things. It’s not that expensive, and this is the asset of your business. This is the core of what makes you a business or [crosstalk 00:41:20]-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
It’s really fantastic that you could do it for such an affordable price because almost anybody can figure out a way to afford 150 bucks a month. It’s not a large amount of money to get approved for or to be able to figure out how to get started if you’re trying to start on a shoestring budget. Some of the cons though mentioned, we were talking about printing again and liquid inks. Naturally there’s just the maintenance that goes along with that. There’s a little bit of work to keeping it up. You have to take care of it. You do have ink and rolled materials, so there’s some investment in supplies. It’s going to cost you more to produce a T-shirt with a BN20, that it would with a Sawgrass sublimation printer. The materials are a little more expensive. You’re going to use more ink. You get a product that can do more, but it costs [crosstalk 00:42:21]-
Mark Stephenson:
But you’re also investing more in supplies in general, because you’re going to store bigger roles of vinyl, and those roll of vinyl are more expensive than if you were just buying white vinyl for the Graphtec, for example. You’re going to invest more there and you’re going to have that roll of vinyl sitting there until you use it. That’s just money that’s tied up and it’s going to cost more to ship. There are attending costs. I will say something about maintenance, is that once you get to the Roland BN20 or BN20a level, the maintenance is serious now. Not that it’s seriously hard, the consequences of not doing it is now in the thousands of dollars or at least in the high hundreds, because you’ll damage electronic pieces inside the printer if you do not maintain it properly. You’re not talking about replacing a six or $700 Sawgrass printer. You’re talking about part of a 6,000, 8,000, $10,000 system.
Marc Vila:
Yep. It just means maintenance becomes even that much more important. Not hard, but important. Overall though, the Roland print and cut it’s just a fantastically popular piece of equipment that does so much. It creates a beautiful output and just like anything, there’re some cons to it, but it’s great.
Mark Stephenson:
I don’t want to gloss over the other cons. Let’s make sure that we point those out before we move on. That is, it’s slow. When you look at other ways, if you were just in the custom T-shirt business and you were judging your success on how many T-shirts you could print an hour, this isn’t it. This is the idea that, you can do T-shirts, but you can also do 57 other things. You’ve got size advantages that other pieces of equipment don’t have. You can do window clings, which is hard to do with any of the other pieces of equipment. It’s not the fastest printer on the market.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Part of that is because you’re printing large things like a T-shirt logo and cutting it too. You’re printing it and cutting it. If you were just cutting a T-shirt like with the Graphtec, that’s obviously faster because there’s a whole printing step you’re skipping. Even with your sublimation, you don’t have to cut anything out with sublimation. You just print and you don’t have to do the cutting after. You do have to cut out the material on the Roland. There are critical steps. Everything has an economy of cost and benefits. The quality and the versatility on the print and cut system by Roland is just amazing. The cost is, it’s a little more expense and slower to be able to create that.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. Because of the setup when you combine those two things, the printing and the cutting, it takes a little bit more knowledge. A little bit more training going from CorelDRAW and Illustrator, which are the recommended softwares. To use it, you got to get those and then you’ve got to be able to set up the prints and the cuts. Which is different than any of these other technologies really that we’re talking about.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s not just automatic that you give it a picture of a dog and it knows to cut it out. The computers are not that smart yet. They don’t know what you want and they can’t just say, cut out a dog for me and it will figure it out. You’ve got to be able to know how to do it. Then also just understand some basics of graphic design and when you would want to cut things out and how to separate parts of an image from another. I mean, there are some complexities. Again, not that hard to learn, but you’ve got to have the software to do it, graphic software, and you have to spend some time to learn how to do it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You got to learn it.
Marc Vila:
You got to learn it. It’s not automatic. I mean, from the beginning of this podcast, we were never in the automatic. But nothing is automatic. But this is going to be more than the Sawgrass, I would say, and then knowledge needed.
Mark Stephenson:
By the way, you’ll notice when we do our demonstrations of any of this equipment, except for maybe on the Graphtec, we are rarely actually creating the designs. We’re mostly printing or cutting or producing the designs, showing you the equipment and application to the shirt or the material or whatever it is. That’s because we’re not in the CorelDRAW business. We’re in the equipment and end result business. If we want a design done, we send it to ColDesi Graphics. We give the idea of the picture and say, “Hey, get this ready for a Roland print and cut or for sublimation or for white toner or DTG.” Or something like that. We handle the graphics. We’re not showing you the graphics. We’re showing you the application as easy as we can get it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, we’re in the business of equipment, not in graphics. I think that’s the perfect way to say it. Or at least not in training people how to use graphics and in selling graphics software. We sell equipment and the software to run the equipment. We have a graphic designer on our marketing team who helps us produce things. I don’t know how to do it. However, I’ve learned over the years how to do some basic stuff myself, so I could do some of the simpler things. Some of the more complicated things, I have to send out to get done. You’re going to have to make those decisions for your business. Are you going to be a graphics expert and learn how to do all this? Are you going to be able to do maybe 25% of it and pay somebody to do the other part? I mean, there’s plenty to be discussed there.
Mark Stephenson:
I feel like we should have called this podcast episode real talk about T-shirt printers.
Marc Vila:
Well, since we’re going to talk about printers, let’s move on to the next one.
Mark Stephenson:
Let’s please. The white toner transfer printers.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. We carry the Digital HeatFX systems, is what we have. We call it the system because it’s generally made up of a UniNet or a CRIO printer. But as we already said, the printer is not everything. We have a whole episode talking about this stuff.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. By the way, before it was called CRIO, those were called OKI printers,
Marc Vila:
OKI printers. Just the new USA branding of what they want to call that brand and that company.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. White toner printers, it’s a very descriptive term. The difference between a color laser printer or a color copier is normally they print a combination of CMYK, which is cyan, yellow, magenta, and black to make a beautiful array of colors. If you just use those, you’re pretty much in the same situation as sublimation. Because they don’t use white ink, you can’t apply it to a dark substrate. White toner, most of the time substitutes the black toner for white. You put that white in there, and now it lays down a white toner layer and then it prints the color on top. That’s kind of the fundamentals of what we’re talking about when we talk about white toner.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a reasonably newer technology compared to everything else we’ve discussed. But they have been around for a while to have tons of these printers out in the market, all over the world. It’s a proven technology.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s ColDesi’s most popular technology.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s one of the most popular technologies worldwide in growth, for sure. The cost of a system like this is going to be, we said about $3,700 to about $15,000, or somewhere around 100 to 400 a month. A very broad range.
Mark Stephenson:
Which is most infuriating answer that we give.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it is. It infuriating.
Mark Stephenson:
It really is.
Marc Vila:
But I mean, it’s-
Mark Stephenson:
How much is a Digital HeatFX system? I don’t know. It’s between-
Marc Vila:
Massive.
Mark Stephenson:
… 4,000 and $15,000.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. There’s a lot of products that are like that and we don’t … Even, I mean, a phone nowadays, how much does it cost to buy a phone? I don’t know. Free or three grand.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, exactly. Somewhere in between.
Marc Vila:
How much is a car? 500 to 5 million. This is just one of those, there’s a lot of options, a lot of choices. This is why you want to talk to one of the experts to find out what you need. We have a whole episode on it, so I think what I would say is, we can go a little light on the description and quick on the pros and cons and recommend listening to the whole episode because there’s a lot of information.
Mark Stephenson:
I agree. I do want to bracket the prices in the middle though and say, most people spend between about eight and 12,000.
Marc Vila:
Okay, great. I think that’s good.
Mark Stephenson:
The pros of-
Marc Vila:
The pros.
Mark Stephenson:
… the white toner printer. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean we’re full color printing, so that’s great. Just like we talked about the Roland and the sublimation. Except it’s toner, so it’s fast. Super fast to print. Significantly faster than anything else because [crosstalk 00:52:18]-
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, I got to stop you. It looks great. If you wrote down everything that you would want in a T-shirt transfer printer, then white toner would click the boxes.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It checks a lot of boxes and it’s not a liquid system. It’s a toner system. That brings the maintenance way, way, way down
Mark Stephenson:
Toner is a powder, by the way. Toner is a powder.
Marc Vila:
It’s a powder. It’s like ground up plastic almost. It’s a super fine powder and that just means that there’s no liquid. Which means there’s significantly less maintenance. You can just turn the printer off and let it sit there for a while and turn it back on and print 100 shirts and then turn it off again.
Mark Stephenson:
I’ve got a Brother laser printer here next to me that I use twice a year. All I do is turn it on and it prints and that’s because it’s a toner printer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s because it’s a toner printer, so you don’t have to worry about printhead clogs and lines and banding. All that stuff is generally just not the same issue with the liquid. You’ve got the versatility like you did with the Roland, so you can do lights and darks and cotton and polyester. It’s just extremely versatile in what you can do. You can do hard goods as well.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Like coasters and-
Marc Vila:
Wood-
Mark Stephenson:
… glass.
Marc Vila:
… glass. Yeah. It’s really versatile there. A benefit over the sublimation and one of the pros, is it doesn’t require any special coatings. You literally can go to a craft store or your wood shop and cut out a shape of a baseball and put a kid’s name on it and you don’t need any special coding or prep. You could just do it straight up on a piece of wood or on a piece of glass. It’s very cool.
Mark Stephenson:
Let’s say that again. If you wanted to take a Sawgrass and you wanted to make coffee mugs, let’s say for example, then you would need to get sublimation, sublimation ready, or sublimatable coffee bags. I just didn’t know how to say that. Because what they do is kind of they bond the ceramic and the coffee mug with a polyester base that makes the sublimation work with it like a polyester T-shirt. But if you went and got a mug from Walmart that wasn’t specifically poly, even if it was white, then the sublimation, it wouldn’t take. It wouldn’t look good. It would wash right off. It would be a disaster.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. On the Digital HeatFX, you don’t need any special coding. No, I mean, there’s going to be limitations and there’s not enough time to go into all that. But generally speaking, if the material can be heated up because you heat apply, if the material can be heated up and you can get it in a heat press, you can just about put a Digital HeatFX transfer onto it. Which is very cool. There’s different papers and stuff like that. There’s a whole episode on this if I didn’t mention that a couple times.
Mark Stephenson:
Did you?
Marc Vila:
I recommend it. I recommend it.
Mark Stephenson:
Should we link to that in the notes or something like that?
Marc Vila:
I don’t know how to do links on the internet. It’ll be in the notes. There are some cons. We should talk about that. Just like every system there is an economy of pros and cons that make things. We are now, I believe I would say it’s taking a next level up in the learning process. There are steps. It’s a little more fine tuned. I’ll be honest, with heat transfer vinyl, if you have a heat press and you accidentally set it to a temperature and put a T-shirt on it and just close it, you will probably have a finished shirt. You can accidentally get it on there. The range of the way it will work is a very, very large range.
Mark Stephenson:
Tolerant. It’s very tolerant.
Marc Vila:
The tolerance. It’s very, very tolerant. As you get to toner, that tolerance level shrinks down a bit more, and so it does require a little more precision. Not hard, but accurate. Not challenging, but accuracy is important.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Not just in the process, in the physical process of peeling it and putting it on the heat press and how you apply it to the shirt and things like that, but also in the environment as well. Because part of the learning process is realizing that everything’s going to change a little bit if you are in a really humid or really dry environment. There are some adjustments that you make. Even after you’ve gone through training, it takes practice and it’s a skill that you develop. The payoff is worth it. The people that do a good job with Digital HeatFX, I mean honestly are just making tons of money. I’m not making that up.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s great. I had a conversation with one of our trainers who’s up in New Jersey and he was talking about that it was really freezing cold in the office when he got in there the first thing in the morning, and he had to raise his heat press up 10 degrees to do the transfers. Just because it was that cold in the room, it was cooling down everything. I mean, this is, like you said, the tolerance is something that is a little tighter. That’s a con. Not hard, but accurate is important. The toner and transfer paper also, it’s not as soft as other ways of printing shirts. Especially when you compare it to DTG sublimation or direct to film, which we’ll get into those next.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It is more in keeping with putting the Roland, in putting a print and cut transfer onto a T-shirt.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s closer to that. Vinyl is dependent. Vinyl is a little bit all over the place because there’s so many materials, but-
Mark Stephenson:
Why is that? What makes it less soft?
Marc Vila:
For one, the liquid inks in general will produce a softer transfer on a shirt. The liquid generally when it’s finished, it’s almost like rubber in a way. If you take some DTG ink that’s been coagulated in a bottle that’s old, if you pull out, I felt that stuff. It feels like a little rubber ball. It gets rubbery. The ink kind of dries like that. Toner and the polymers on that are going to dry a little more closer to paper than rubber. They’re not as flexible. They’re not going to stretch as much. The stretch and return is not as much. There’s some there to a degree, but not nearly as much as say like a DFT or sublimation for various reasons.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Now let’s specify here that you can do designs with white toner printing that can be incredibly soft.
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. You can. I mean the right design with plenty of white space doing logos and things like that, it’ll feel great. I’ve got, and I know you do too, I’ve got white toner transfer printed shirts that I’ve had for years and they feel terrific.
Marc Vila:
Absolutely. I think it just goes to level one on the con or the first thing you mentioned, the cons. Is the precision in the learning. If you’ve taken the time to learn how to do it and learn the graphics and you build together a shirt that makes sense with the graphic and the process of making it, your finished good is amazing. If you do it wrong or you skip steps or you don’t know how to edit your graphic in a good way, then you could get a finished product that’s not as soft as, say, if you were to have done it in sublimation. I think that’s a learning curve thing. Where in sublimation, you could take a picture of a dog, send it to your printer, put it on a shirt and it will feel great. It might not look perfect yet because you didn’t do any graphic arts, but it will feel amazing. If you did that with the Digital HeatFX, it’s going to feel like you have a transfer on a shirt. If you did that with a Roland, the same thing.
Mark Stephenson:
I think this is one of those trade-offs where we say there’s no perfect printer, it’s just what’s best for your business. I think white toner transfer printers are very close to being perfect, but you are trading the ability to take a transfer and put it on virtually any fabric and virtually any color. You’re trading the ability to do that with maybe the permanence and the softness of a sublimation print. Because you won’t get it that way with the Roland and you won’t get it that way with white transfer. You’re trading that versatility of color and material for those other factors.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to what turned out to be part one of two podcasts on the 2022 price and feature survey of what the best T-shirt printers are on the market.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. All this information will be continued with the other half of the list in a part two episode. We just broke this up just to make it a little bit more digestible so you didn’t have to have an hour and a half to two hour long episode about this. But it’s all great information and stay tuned for the next episode to wrap it up.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you want to, just let this one roll into the next one.
Marc Vila:
There you go. Perfect.
The post Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1) appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.
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Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1)
This Episode
Mark Stephenson & Marc Vila
You Will Learn
- How much t-shirt printing equipment cost
Resources & Links
Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1)
Show Notes
That machine is WAY too expensive.
Why would I buy that when a cricut can do the same thing?
It only cost that much to own a business? I thought it was so much more.
What is the best t-shirt printer?
These are the comments you will read on social media posts about the t-shirt business. As you can see, there are assumptions people are making or just a lack of in depth knowledge about the t-shirt printing business.
In this episode we are going to jump into .. what does t-shirt printing equipment cost?
This episode was inspired by an article, on ColDesi… which was inspired by the questions and comments from people above. (Click here to read the article)
Keep in mind all of these prices and estimated financing costs are as of when we wrote this podcast and probably will change over time. However, for the time being we can assume all of this data will still be reasonably accurate for some time.
Heat Transfer Vinyl
Brands
- Graphtec
- Roland
Cost
- Starting around $2400 or about $65 a month
Pros
- One of the easiest to learn / simplest machines
- Very versatile – lights, darks, cotton, poly, stickers, t-shirts, signs
- Little-to-no maintenance
- Nice quality finished goods
- 10x faster than a cricut / hobby cutter
Cons
- You aren’t digital printing
- Storing and investing in rolls of material
- Range of production speed varies a lot (1 color, simple design VS 4 color complex design)
Sublimation
Brand: Sawgrass
- SG1000
- SG500
Cost
- $600 – $6000 or $45 – $165 financed
Pros
- Relatively easy to learn
- Extremely versatile
- Finished print is now “a part of” the t-shirt (or mug or mousepad or totebag)
Cons
- Only meant for white / light colored items
- Polyester or sublimation coated items only
- Ink systems require some maintenance
- Ink can get expensive over time
Print & Cut
Brand: Roland
- BN-20
- BN-20A
Cost
- $6000 – $8000 or starting about $165 a month financed
Pros
- Full Digital Prints
- Very versatile – t-shirts to signs to window clings to car decals
- Can do the same as a vinyl cutter above, but can also print
- BIG prints about 20″ x HUGE
- Versatile – lights, darks, cotton, poly
Cons
- Ink and Printable vinyl has a higher supply cost than other methods
- Can be considered slow when compared
- Requires a bit more graphics knowledge to set up prints and cuts
White Toner Transfer Printers
Brand: DigitalHeat FX
- Uninet & Crio
- i560, 8432wt, i650, 9541wt
Cost
- $3700 – $15000 or about $100 – $400 a month
Pros
- Full color digital prints
- Very fast print time
- Little-to-no maintenance
- Versatile lights, darks, cotton, poly.
- Can be used on hard good with no special coatings required
Cons
- More precise learning process, requires practice
- Toner and transfer paper is not as soft as alternatives like DTG, Sublimation, DTF
- Cost per print higher than other methods like DTG or DTF
Direct to Garment Printing
Brand: DTG
Cost
- $15000 – $24000 or about $350 – $600 a month financed
Pros
- Amazing colors and full digital prints
- Washes and wears beautifully
- No transfer required, more details
- Low cost per print
Cons
- Light colors – cotton & poly – Darks – Best for cotton only
- Liquid ink systems requires maintenance
- Good knowledge of graphics really helps to get the best prints
DTF – Direct to Film
Brands: DTF / Coldesi – DigitalHeat FX
Cost
- Still a growing field of printers but right now about $25k or $690 a month financed.
Pros
- Amazing quality digital prints
- Wears, washes and looks great
- Super fast
- Very low supply cost
Cons
- Liquid and film system requires maintenance
- Initial cost to invest is one of the highest
- It’s bigger and louder than anything on the list
Hopefully this information helps you to understand what it costs to invest in a t-shirt printing system and which one is best for you. Be sure to click the link and read the article for more information: How Much Does It Cost? Comparing Pricing and Payments on Custom T-Shirt Printing Equipment – ColDesi
Transcript:
Mark Stephenson:
Hey Everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Custom Apparel Startups podcast. This is Mark Stephenson.
Marc Vila:
This is Marc Vila. Today, we’re going to talk about how much does it cost, a 2022 T-shirt printer options buying guide of sorts.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. I like all that.
Marc Vila:
This is kind of what the world we live in marketing and talking about T-shirt printers with folks online. We hear, how much does it cost to start a T-shirt printing business? Wow. That machine’s way too expensive.
Mark Stephenson:
No matter what machine it is.
Marc Vila:
No matter what machine it is. Or the other way. Wow. It’s only that much? I thought I was going to be so much more.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Not very often.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Why would I buy this printer when my Cricut can do the same thing?
Mark Stephenson:
Right. That’s never true.
Marc Vila:
Or what’s the best T-shirt? What was that?
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Which is never true.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Which is never true. What’s the best T-shirt printer. This is the things that we run into online. When we’re talking to folks on social media or answering questions online, or when people call in, they ask this stuff and it really inspired this episode that we should kind of have a one and tell all about all the different printers and what do they cost and maybe some pros and cons.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I think ColDesi in a unique position in the marketplace to do this too, because we get so many of these kinds of questions because we sell them all. Because we deal with all of the technologies, direct to garment printing, and DTF and white toner, and sublimation, transfers and vinyl, print and cut. There’s really not much that we don’t do so we’ve got something in every piece of the market and can really do a good job of maybe helping you walk through and fitting your application to how much you have to spend. Or changing how much you have to spend to fit your application.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. This is something that I know I’ve said 100 times maybe, or maybe not on the podcast, probably, but in real life, I say it almost every day, is that there just isn’t a best way to print T-shirts just like there isn’t a best car. The classic example I say is, what do you mean? A sports car versus a pickup truck. They are very, very different, very, very amazing vehicles. But if you have a roofing company, they it’s different than if you are retiring on the beach. Two different things you want to own. I think we could just start to go into some of the different technologies.
Marc Vila:
In each technology that we have at ColDesi, we’ll talk about what equipment we sell, about how much it costs, a little bit about financing it, about how much it costs for a monthly payment and then a little bit of a pro and con. This isn’t every single piece of information. This is a little snippet. Then the one caveat we have to say is, is that the prices and technology and offering that we’re talking about is what’s available at the time when we wrote this podcast.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Thanks for that because we kind of based this on an article. That we got the idea from an article that we did. I think Marc Vila probably did it.
Marc Vila:
I don’t know if I did.
Mark Stephenson:
About a survey of, we did best T-shirt printers for you. We noticed a couple things as soon as we opened it up. The article was six months old, so some of the pricing in it was wrong. It was just before we came out with the high volume direct to film printer, so a significant piece of technology was missing. When we do these podcasts, when we write content for websites, and this goes for anybody, it’s really time dependent and you should realize that if you … For example, price on one of the products in the article had gone up, price on DTG printers had come down a little bit. You should always realize that when you look at an article, as opposed to an e-commerce site, like Colman and Company, where you can buy supplies and machines directly online, that there’s going to be some variability. We tried to do a range in this podcast, which still may or may be true by the time you listen to it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. But I do feel confident that this will give you an overall picture of what you’re looking at. It’s a snapshot of today in the beginning of 2022, when this podcast was done. If you’re listening to this in the year 2032, 10 years from now, for one, thank you. Thank you for listening.
Mark Stephenson:
Thanks for still having that antique podcast playing device.
Marc Vila:
A lot of this stuff might change. But jokingly, realistically, I mean, all year, this is going to be pretty darn close, I would say. Even through next year, it’ll be pretty darn close, and there may even be some more options that we’ll have. In all, listen to this podcast, learn some good stuff, get some good questions, write them down. I like to talk about doing homework. The best homework you could do is when you hear us talk about something or you find something interesting, write it down, make a note. Then when it’s time for you to talk to one of the pros at ColDesi, then you’ll have some questions to ask. You can just say, “Hey, I was listening to the podcast. They talked about this. What do you think?” They’ll keep you informed on what’s up to date. Let’s go ahead and let’s get into one.
Mark Stephenson:
Okay. The first one you’ve got down here, and this isn’t necessarily all lowest cost to highest cost, but definitely getting into heat transfer vinyl is one of the most economical ways to start in custom apparel or customization of a lot of things. If you’re not familiar with it, if you’ve never seen a cutter before, as far as you know, if you think of Cricut, which is the most popular brand, basically all vinyl cutters do pretty much the same thing. You put, in our case, a heat transfer vinyl into a machine. You send a design to it and then the machine cuts out the outline of the design in the vinyl. Whether it’s a sheet or a roll. Then after it comes out, then you use some kind of a tool or your fingers to peel it off and you then heat press that onto a garment or onto some kind of a hard good. Does that sum it up, Marc?
Marc Vila:
Yeah, I think it’s great. I mean, it’s like a computer controlled razor blade.
Mark Stephenson:
I like that.
Marc Vila:
It is what it is. I-
Mark Stephenson:
You just said what I said, only mine took 20 minutes and yours took five.
Marc Vila:
You’ve taught me how to do that, Mark. That’s you. You’ve taught me how to do that.
Mark Stephenson:
That’s great.
Marc Vila:
At ColDesi, we carry, one would debate, the two top brands. The [crosstalk 00:07:22]-
Mark Stephenson:
Well, they are the two top brands of commercial business oriented.
Marc Vila:
Commercial. You mentioned the Cricut earlier and then the Silhouette would be another, and there’s other generic hobby cutters out there that you can buy at Walmart or Michaels or Jo-Anns or any places like that. Those are fun and cool toys for the hobbyist. But when you want to do something commercial, you want to step up to a commercial piece of equipment. For one, they’re designed to run all day and they’re significantly faster and the materials are significantly cheaper, and it’s a way to run a business.
Mark Stephenson:
I think that’s two things you just said. Is the commercial cutters are larger, so they’ll hold wider rolls of material. Just in that, you pay less for every shirt you make, so you’ll make more profit. It’s significantly faster. You can do more designs for hour, which means you’re working less to produce the same amount of work. You get three different ways to make more profit just because you’re using a commercial heat transfer vinyl cutter versus a consumer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. We kind of estimated a cost of a cutting system to start around $2,500. Honestly, that’s not the low end of the price because you could probably just get a cutter for less than $1,500 or around that delivered. But we try to be realistic to say, you’re going to need some vinyl, you’re going to need some papers and materials. You may or may not need a heat press, which can bump that number up a bit more, but around 24, $2,500 is a reasonable way to say you could probably get started there.
Mark Stephenson:
Marc, I know that something like the Cricut is 12 inches.
Marc Vila:
I believe it is. [crosstalk 00:09:28]-
Mark Stephenson:
12 inches. What would an entry level commercial cutter start at? What size?
Marc Vila:
In size?
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Cutters are generally going to be, if we’re talking about entry level style, because they go huge … You can buy a cutter that’s wider than your house.
Mark Stephenson:
As big as your house basically.
Marc Vila:
Right. But that’s probably not what most businesses are going to get into. Most are going to get into a 15 or a 20 inch cutter. That’s the width. The great thing about these cutters is, it’s not just the width, but it’s the length. These things can cut six feet or 18 feet long worth of material.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. That’s as opposed to a Silhouette or a Cricut where typically you’re feeding in a sheet at a time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A 12 by 12 [crosstalk 00:10:19]-
Mark Stephenson:
You’re doing one shirt front design, and then you’re printing another one, and then you’re printing another one. Where you can set a commercial cutter to print 57 of these things.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. On repeat.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It’ll just spit them right out.
Marc Vila:
All types of other things to help automate it. Like pause after every one until you hit a button. Or eject the paper or the vinyl material out 2.25 inches so you can cut it off with a razor blade and then start again, and copy and repeat functions. But anyway, tons of more stuff not worth getting into, but they can do a lot.
Mark Stephenson:
I think one thing that you wrote down here, that even at the commercial level you can start doing financing for these. You can start paying by the month. From a cash basis they can seem less expensive if you’re in business than even buying a Cricut. Because if you’re spending, let’s say … I’m just trying to do a little math here. You could spend 60 bucks a month, 80 bucks a month and get a complete commercial cutter setup as opposed to having to write a check for 800 bucks for one of the hiring Cricuts.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You could cancel Netflix and go to Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts twice a month less and get one of these.
Mark Stephenson:
Marc, neither one of those is on the table. Not for anybody. There’s nobody that would give up Netflix to start a business. That’s just not-
Marc Vila:
If you do it-
Mark Stephenson:
I’m right in the middle of Reacher. I don’t know what I would do.
Marc Vila:
Okay. Well, something out there. There’s a subscription you can cancel. But it is affordable, which is great. That’s what I love them.
Mark Stephenson:
You can still get the newspaper and do that. [crosstalk 00:12:11]-
Marc Vila:
Let’s talk about some pros and cons. Go ahead.
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, you’re the cutter guy. I mean, I know that these things are just really simple to learn. The software is simple. One of the reasons that it’s simple is because you’re not dealing with photos or full color. You’re really just talking about outlines. You’re talking about doing the lines, so you don’t have to worry about color correction or what color it prints or anything like that. It’s a simple design process.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Any system that exists, period, whether it’s a phone or a hammer or a cutter, the simpler the system, the easier it is to learn to use, the less likely it is to break. It’s just easier in general. A hammer, you may still have your dad’s hammer from the ’40s or the ’50s or the ’60s and it still works. But you probably don’t have someone’s cell phone from the ’90s.
Mark Stephenson:
If your dad was using a hammer in the ’60s, that means you’re probably a millennial. You don’t know how to use a hammer. You don’t know what that’s all about.
Marc Vila:
Whatever it might be, it’s a simpler system to do. It’s a razor blade with a computer.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You know what?
Marc Vila:
There’s less things to learn.
Mark Stephenson:
You know what I really love about it though, is that the output is so good. It’s really an amazing quality if you use a good quality heat transfer vinyl. You can tell because if you buy the stuff from Michaels or from Target or wherever you get it locally, it’s pretty thick. When you put it onto a garment, it feels like you’ve got something there. It feels a little crunchy. But if you use a good brand, then it hardly feels like it’s there.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s really thin. The adhesive that’s on the back is really lightweight. The material is really thin. They’re made out of polyurethane type materials that have a lot of stretch that stick to shirts really well and they’re beautiful. We have our Triton brand-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Which is great.
Marc Vila:
… a heat transfer vinyl. Which is just so nice. That’s definitely an upgrade when you get into the commercials, being able to use materials like that. But-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’ll also say one that we didn’t mention here as far as pros go, is there’s really almost no limit to how big a design you can do. If you’re going to do numbers on the back of a shirt, it’s a great idea to do that in vinyl. If you wanted to do a design all the way down a table runner and you don’t mind putting each piece through your heat press, then you can print out a single design as long as you want to on vinyl. That’s how they do banners in some cases. You can do all that with a commercial cutter as well.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s a great point and it just points to a lot of this is about versatility and quality. Cutting and cutters in general and using materials, it’s just extremely versatile. You can go on almost any shirt. It doesn’t matter the color or the material. You can also do signs and stickers and wall stickers and commercial signs for windows and car decals. They are just extremely versatile. There’s tons of different materials you can buy from metallics to glitter, to T-shirt stuff, to sticker stuff. Just the versatility’s amazing on a cutter. They’re simple to learn, and then topping that all off because of this simplicity, there’s not much maintenance you have to do. There’s little to no maintenance and you get a great finished good. Overall, I mean, the pros are super nice for a cutter.
Mark Stephenson:
I’d say this is the one device that I don’t care which kind of apparel decoration business that you’re in or what equipment you already have, you should probably have a cutter. You know what I mean? It is such a Swiss Army Knife. It can fill in a pinch. It’ll do things that some of these other devices won’t do. It’s up and running constantly. You don’t have to do maintenance. You can train somebody to use it very quickly. It’s just you should have one. This is a good one.
Marc Vila:
You know what’s great about it? It made me think about it. That one of the first tools you can get for your child, maybe as they get older, it might be a little handheld multi tool. Because it’s got pliers on it and a screw driver and a knife and some stuff like that. It’s just a great starter tool because it’s small, it’s not expensive, it’s not a big investment and it does a whole bunch of stuff. If it’s a nice quality one-
Mark Stephenson:
It’ll last forever.
Marc Vila:
… you’ll last use it. Yeah, it’ll last forever. You’ll still use it. Even when you have a full toolbox, which I have, I have tons of tools, I use my multi tool all the time that I’ve had for 20 years. I still use it. That’s what the cutter really is. It’s a great multi tool. It’s not a huge investment, great output. But there are some cons. We might as well bring them up.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I would say probably the big … Now these are cons that if this is the only thing you have to run your business. If this is your business, then probably the biggest con is, everyone that you do a shirt for with heat transfer vinyl, from a Graphtec or a roll and cutter, is going to ask you if you can do a picture or more colors. They’re always going to ask, “Hey, that looks great. Can I get this 17 color logo for my business? Can I get that?” Or, “Can I get a picture of my kid on this coffee mug?” The answer’s going to be no because it’s not a full colored digital device.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s not digital printing, which is great for its simplicity, but you do lose out on a feature that is something a lot of people want. Digital is huge nowadays. The other thing is, because you’re cutting rolled material, you’re going to have stacks and piles and boxes of rolled material that you accumulate and have to invest in. They take up space. If you have a new customer that wants golden blue, and you’ve never done golden blue before, you may have to buy two rolls of material that might cost 60, 70 bucks or something like that. The order that you’re doing may just pay for the material. Now, it’s in your inventory and hopefully you can sell that later, but that can be a con of this. Is that now you’ve got this color gold and it takes up space. I mean, they take up some space. These are going to be 15 inch-
Mark Stephenson:
It happens in the Colman and Company warehouse.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It takes up a lot of space.
Mark Stephenson:
We have tons of space full of all the colors that you might want.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, exactly. That is a downside. Then the other downside, which is a little more complicated to say, so hopefully in a simple way, but the range of production speed varies a ton. What mean by that is, if you have a small logo that’s one color and it’s very simple design, McDonald’s M, I mean, you could do a ton of those shirts in an hour. A ton. Fast, easy, one color. The process where you’re weeding or removing out the material you don’t want is going to be one simple pull, one simple swipe because it’s easy. Now, if you want to comparatively do something a much more complicated logo where that’s maybe four colors and it’s got lots of lettering in it, maybe just a home improvement type of company, then you might find that producing that same logo might not be four times slower. It could be 10 times slower.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Because you’ve got to weed out the windows on the house, that kind of thing. You got to do that.
Marc Vila:
It’s four colors, so you’re cutting four different colors and you’re lining up the four different colors once they’re all cut out and done. The scale of the speed can be faster than any other technology or significantly slower than any other technology. That’s a little bit of a con because you do have to understand managing that and understanding that. It’s a little bit of a complex con, but it’s really important, I think, compared to other types of printing. Where it doesn’t matter what you do, it’s pretty much all the same speed.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. There you go. Okay. I think that’s good. I think they’ve got a good idea of heat transfer vinyl. The price, you’re going to start around 2,400 bucks. You can get just the cutter for much less, but you’re going to need more than just that.
Marc Vila:
Yes. Everything you need more than just that. But hopefully that that’s, and it’s something we don’t have to say, but with everything in life, you always got to buy an accessory for it and sometimes you need them.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s funny. I love the chats we get on ColDesi because if you’re in Facebook and you see an ad for Digital HeatFX, then, and we’re going to talk about white toner printing soon, you know that if somebody says, how much is that printer? You know that you have four printer choices. Each one of those four printers has three bundles, a good, better, best bundle each. That’s 12 different decisions to make and there are, of course, options within that if you want to do hats and things like that. When you go to the ColDesi Facebook page and you say, how much is that printer? Then you get all of the Digital HeatFX and DTG, the four UV printers, the DTF printer. I mean, it’s just it’s compounded. The answer to what that price is that we’re going to talk about through here and the questions that we get about how much something is going, I’m reminded about how excited I am to get this out. Because now I’m just going to send a link to the podcast.
Marc Vila:
No, that’s great. We’re going to do sublimation next, but before we do it, you reminded me of something that just should be said out loud. Because every once in a while, we’ll get somebody and just today actually, I was asked to update a product page because some people had thought that it was unfair to just show the price of the printer when they need more things. That’s a rock and a hard place thing because people want to know how much the printer costs because that’s an essential question. What does this one device cost? But you need other things. I mean, I would have guessed if you go and buy a digital camera, you need a memory card, you need a case, you probably need a tripod, you might need additional lenses. It’s not uncommon in our world that when you buy something you might … Your iPhone doesn’t even come with a power plug anymore.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Good point.
Marc Vila:
You can’t even charge it. You literally can’t charge an iPhone that you buy.
Mark Stephenson:
But you can buy the phone for that price.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a bit of a nature of the world, but devices, a lot of things are sold independently now. We have a printer and a price for all of this stuff, but everything we recommend a bundle or a package that includes multiple things. Having said that out loud, let’s talk about sublimation.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Let’s do that because it’s really inexpensive.
Marc Vila:
Great. We love that.
Mark Stephenson:
You get to do full color.
Marc Vila:
Well, we love that too. We’re already getting into pros. Let’s start off with-
Mark Stephenson:
I know. Well, I mean …
Marc Vila:
First of all, we’ll start with that, at ColDesi, we have the Sawgrass brand printers, which currently are the SG500 and the SG1000. It’s just a size difference in how big they are. They both do similar things. The price range for sublimation packages, we’re going to say for 600 if you just buy a printer up to 6,000, if you buy the biggest one they have, and then a bunch of prices in between of packages.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. The other thing I’ll say is, we chose the Sawgrass brand for a reason, just like with Roland and Graphtec. One of the reasons we chose Sawgrass is because they’ve got very good training that the manufacturer does, which is great. Unlike a lot of other manufacturers, Sawgrass is putting this product and the ink and everything together into one package. They’re not selling you an Epson printer and then you go and source the sublimation ink, and then you’re not doing your own work to make this printer work. It’s a great deal. It’s a nice little package and it does a ton for anywhere between 60 and $6,000.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a purpose built system, so the whole thing is designed just for sublimation. They’ve got a great reputation and we could probably attest to that ourselves because a ton of customers out there using Sawgrass printers love them. It’s a great product. Some of the pros of the Sawgrass sublimation printers, I would say they’re also relatively easy to learn. It’s relatively easy to learn. You’re just printing with CMYK. It’s essentially the same as any home printer you’ve ever used in how you print.
Mark Stephenson:
Let me interrupt you here because I want to differentiate between saying that the cutter software is easy to learn and it’s easy to learn to use the Sawgrass systems. That there’s some fundamental complexities in Sawgrass because now you’re dealing with full color. It’s definitely going to be more complicated than using a cutter because you’ve got different colors. You’re going to take a picture with your phone. You’re going to put it on the computer. It may not look the same. You’re going to want to remove things out of the picture. Your customers are going to want to do this. It’s a great product. The software is easy to use compared to a lot of other full color printers. It’s just different than using a cutter. [crosstalk 00:27:01]-
Marc Vila:
Yeah. You bring up a good point and it’s an answer that can be mildly complicated, but it’s important to understand. If somebody sends you the McDonald’s logo because you get McDonald’s as a client, how wonderful is that? [crosstalk 00:27:23]-
Mark Stephenson:
That’s the only way, by the way, you should be printing the McDonald’s logo.
Marc Vila:
Yes. But it’s an M. To print that in the Sawgrass or in the Graphtec is probably going to be the same amount of work relatively. There’s some things you have to learn. I’m just saying that. You don’t know how to do it now, listening to it if you haven’t used these. You have to learn things, but relatively easy to use. If somebody sends you a picture of their dog and they say, “Can you print exactly this?” The Sawgrass is probably going to be pretty easy to do, because you can bring it in and print it and you’ll get a print and you can print exactly what they gave you.
Marc Vila:
If you wanted to cut out an image of the dog, like Hannah did a great video where she converted a picture of her dog into a cuttable kind of 2D shape, that’s hard to do. There’s a little bit of a give and take, back and forth here on the ease of use. A little bit of a depends. But to your point, you are doing full colors now, so there’s another degree of complexity that happens. Because when you print that image of the dog and then you put it on a shirt, it might not come out the way the customer was hoping it would. Because they saw it on the phone.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You might end up with a picture of a beige retriever.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Or just there was a flash and there’s a hotspot of a flash that shows up, so part of the dog’s face looks empty or missing. Then that means you’re learning graphics a little bit. You’re learning how to edit photos. There’s a little bit of complexity there and a little bit of a depends. But I would still say relatively easy to learn and use.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Also, it brings up a good point. When you buy a printing device from ColDesi, we typically provide you training on how to use it and it’s normally very good. We do not provide training on how to create the graphics. That part, none of these devices come with every picture you would want to print built into the printer. You do have to arrange to get graphics done. You have to do it yourself, or you have to get it from your customer. The Sawgrass and sublimation printing is pretty forgiving and it’s very simple to use, but it will not do a design on your behalf. None of these things will.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, exactly. Everything’s got a learning curve. But the pros of sublimation are really just, they’re beautiful. You get a great finished product. I think that kind of just wraps it up. Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
You can’t understate that. You can get a beautiful print from sublimation.
Marc Vila:
You just get an amazing finished product and it becomes a part of it, literally. Well, that’s kind of the nature of sublimation, is you’re physically changing the properties of whatever you’re making, like a T-shirt. You’ve now physically changed the shirt. You didn’t glue something on top of it or stick something on top, like with vinyl. You’ve actually changed to the shirt and it’s going to feel good, it’s going to wash good. The same is true from mugs and all these other things.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That is the versatility is one of the pluses because a lot of promotional products that you might buy or you might steal off somebody’s table at a trade show, the key chain, the coffee mug things like that, they’re frequently done with sublimation and they hold up great. You’re already not only in the custom T-shirt business, if you’re willing to spend the money on an alternative heat press, you could be in the custom hat business and the custom mug business and all of that stuff.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. That’s great and I love this stuff. It’s great technology, great value. There are some cons to it too.
Mark Stephenson:
These are bummers.
Marc Vila:
Bummers.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s a bummer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it’s a bummer.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s a bummer that you can only print on light colored items like on whites. Like on this shirt that I’m wearing here, this dark gray, you’re never going to use sublimation on it.
Marc Vila:
No. This is a light green that I’m wearing. If I wanted to do a black logo on here, I could probably sublimate this, but that’s just about it. I’m not going to get any colors on this. I’m not going to be able to do any reds or yellows or light blues or purples, anything like that. The green is going to change it. It’s pretty limited, but you can do some light colors. But really you’re going to be limited to light colors and then polyester or sublimation coated items. The item has to be available to sublimate, which is not a cotton T-shirt and it’s not a piece of wood that you purchased from the craft store. It has to be a special item.
Mark Stephenson:
The polyester really, the more it is 100% polyester, the better it’s going to look and the better it’s going to be react. Just and the darker a shirt gets, the sublimation doesn’t have white ink, so whatever you put it on, whatever you put that sublimation transfer on, the color of the item, you’re pressing it to impacts the color of the design. Let’s say, you’re going to do an American flag print and you’re going to do that. If you did it on a bright white, 100% polyester shirt, it’s going to look amazing. It’s really going to pop.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Beautiful.
Mark Stephenson:
If you do it on a tri-blend light colored shirt, it’ll probably be muted. It’ll probably be pretty muted. If you did it on a black, cotton shirt, it’s going to look terrible.
Marc Vila:
Invisible. Relatively invisible. Then speaking of just printing and inks and stuff like that, we’re now into a liquid based system, so we have liquid inks. If you’ve owned a printer before, you know that printers just require a little bit of TLC. You got to keep it clean. You want to keep it on and plugged in so it can do some self-cleaning. If you don’t use it in a long time, you may need to do cleaning cycles, which uses ink and things like that. You do now have cartridges to replace. With the cutter, you were just replacing a blade that lasts pretty darn long. With this, you’re going to be running out of ink and colors and you want to make sure that you have ink in stock. That’s a bit of a pro too, because you need four colors of ink to do all your colors. Your inventory is four items.
Mark Stephenson:
You’re not doing one color at a time.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. But there is a little bit of maintenance to be had now. You’re getting into a complicated.
Mark Stephenson:
I think it’s good that you pointed out that anytime you have liquid ink, it’s very much kind of like running an engine on your lawnmower or snowblower or anything that requires pretty regular maintenance. It requires you to take care of it or it gets sludgy. I think that’s the technical term that supports used if you don’t maintain, slugginess. You got to take care of it. Where with cutter, that’s not true.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. A cutter, you just stick it under your desk and you don’t use it in forever and then you turn it back on one day and use it. If you did that with a printer you’d ruin it.
Mark Stephenson:
With an ink or an inkjet printer.
Marc Vila:
An ink or an inkjet printer. A liquid ink system.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. There you go.
Marc Vila:
Speaking of liquid ink systems, let’s move on to the next one which is a hybrid of printing and cutting, print and cut systems. We have the Roland brand, which is just considered to be the best out there. A lot of people agree, the BN20 and the newer BN20a. This is a system that is like your cutter that we mentioned earlier, but it’s got a printer built into it as well. You can print onto a material, and then that will go back into the machine and cut your print and your shape out where you can make T-shirts or sticker or anything you like in whatever shape you want it to.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. That’s a great description. Imagine your Cricut, if it could hold a 20 inch roll of vinyl and had a professional in inkjet printer bolted to the side. Because what it does is, it actually, it’ll take that picture, excuse me, of the beige retriever that you were printing out on the-
Marc Vila:
The sublimation.
Mark Stephenson:
On the sublimation printer. It’s going to print that out onto a white vinyl. You’re using the white vinyl as a substitute for white ink, and it’s cutting that design out like a cutter does. You end up with something that is incredibly versatile. That looks fantastic. I’m really impressed with the look on one of these Roland BN20 systems.
Marc Vila:
It’s a beautiful system. The cost of this system is about six to $8,000 ish. About $165 a month financed, and give or take. You may or may not need a heat press depending on what you’re going to do with the printer. Or you may already own one on whatever [crosstalk 00:37:10]-
Mark Stephenson:
You can have terrible credit and it’ll be $500 or something like that.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of factors. There’s a lot of factors. But there is financing available and it’s about six to $8,000. It’s a very popular system. Tons of people have it and the reason they do is because of these pros. We’ve got a full digital printing capability, so hundreds of thousands of colors or whatever it might be. You can print full pictures. It’s really versatile. You can print a picture of a dog on a T-shirt, then a picture of a dog for a sticker for a wall, and then for a window cling and then for a car decal. You can go from signs, to banners, to T-shirts, to stickers to put on a laptop. It’s a beautifully versatile machine.
Mark Stephenson:
It does a lot.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it does a lot. It does everything your cutter, mentioned before, will do. You can buy the metallic gold material that your customer wanted and you can just cut it out just like you could with your cutter and not print anything on it. It’s still a cutter too, which is great. It’s a bit of a two in one almost type of machine. This is a 20 inch wide, the BN20a. You can print 20 inches wide and then just a huge long role, like you mentioned earlier in cutting. I mean, the size, especially if you piece things together, you can go huge with this stuff. [crosstalk 00:38:43]-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. I’d say that a lot of our, or not a lot, many customers that have the BN20, just use it for banners. I mean, they’re actually printing banners for different things or there’s some that just are in the window cling business, wine bottle labels. There’s tons of applications for it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s a great for making packages for a company. We did a brewery video, kind of a mock brewery. We did stickers that went on glasses and sticker to hand out to customers and a sign for the door and a window cling and T-shirts and aprons. You can do a lot of stuff with this one printer and it does beautifully. It’s versatile, light colors, dark colors, cotton, polyester, just like the vinyl.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If your question is, why should I get a BN20 instead of one of the Sawgrass sublimation printers, then it’s, well, I can print out beautiful color images and I can pretty much put them on whatever I want to without restriction to material? Why would I get it versus one of the Roland or Graphtec cutters? It’s so I can do full color and it’s a bigger cutter.
Marc Vila:
Yep. No, it was not just one color at a time. It’s as many colors you want at once.
Mark Stephenson:
I know we’re going to get to the cons, but I just want to point out here that this is where the financing payments start to strike me a little bit. Because we’re talking about 165 bucks or so for the Roland And it was … How much? $65 for the Graphtec. Something along those lines. Really you’re talking about $100 a month. The difference between something that is bigger and will give you full color and the ability to do a lot more things. It starts to get striking. If you’re out there and you’re thinking about messaging us or calling ColDesi and saying, “How much is the printer?” You should probably add, how much is it a month because that’s an important calculation too.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, if you’re going to start a business and you’re going to get a website and pay your fees to the state and all these other little fees you’re going to pay to start a business, you’ll spend more than you would on a monthly payment on one of these things. It’s not that expensive, and this is the asset of your business. This is the core of what makes you a business or [crosstalk 00:41:20]-
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah.
Marc Vila:
It’s really fantastic that you could do it for such an affordable price because almost anybody can figure out a way to afford 150 bucks a month. It’s not a large amount of money to get approved for or to be able to figure out how to get started if you’re trying to start on a shoestring budget. Some of the cons though mentioned, we were talking about printing again and liquid inks. Naturally there’s just the maintenance that goes along with that. There’s a little bit of work to keeping it up. You have to take care of it. You do have ink and rolled materials, so there’s some investment in supplies. It’s going to cost you more to produce a T-shirt with a BN20, that it would with a Sawgrass sublimation printer. The materials are a little more expensive. You’re going to use more ink. You get a product that can do more, but it costs [crosstalk 00:42:21]-
Mark Stephenson:
But you’re also investing more in supplies in general, because you’re going to store bigger roles of vinyl, and those roll of vinyl are more expensive than if you were just buying white vinyl for the Graphtec, for example. You’re going to invest more there and you’re going to have that roll of vinyl sitting there until you use it. That’s just money that’s tied up and it’s going to cost more to ship. There are attending costs. I will say something about maintenance, is that once you get to the Roland BN20 or BN20a level, the maintenance is serious now. Not that it’s seriously hard, the consequences of not doing it is now in the thousands of dollars or at least in the high hundreds, because you’ll damage electronic pieces inside the printer if you do not maintain it properly. You’re not talking about replacing a six or $700 Sawgrass printer. You’re talking about part of a 6,000, 8,000, $10,000 system.
Marc Vila:
Yep. It just means maintenance becomes even that much more important. Not hard, but important. Overall though, the Roland print and cut it’s just a fantastically popular piece of equipment that does so much. It creates a beautiful output and just like anything, there’re some cons to it, but it’s great.
Mark Stephenson:
I don’t want to gloss over the other cons. Let’s make sure that we point those out before we move on. That is, it’s slow. When you look at other ways, if you were just in the custom T-shirt business and you were judging your success on how many T-shirts you could print an hour, this isn’t it. This is the idea that, you can do T-shirts, but you can also do 57 other things. You’ve got size advantages that other pieces of equipment don’t have. You can do window clings, which is hard to do with any of the other pieces of equipment. It’s not the fastest printer on the market.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. Part of that is because you’re printing large things like a T-shirt logo and cutting it too. You’re printing it and cutting it. If you were just cutting a T-shirt like with the Graphtec, that’s obviously faster because there’s a whole printing step you’re skipping. Even with your sublimation, you don’t have to cut anything out with sublimation. You just print and you don’t have to do the cutting after. You do have to cut out the material on the Roland. There are critical steps. Everything has an economy of cost and benefits. The quality and the versatility on the print and cut system by Roland is just amazing. The cost is, it’s a little more expense and slower to be able to create that.
Mark Stephenson:
Yep. Because of the setup when you combine those two things, the printing and the cutting, it takes a little bit more knowledge. A little bit more training going from CorelDRAW and Illustrator, which are the recommended softwares. To use it, you got to get those and then you’ve got to be able to set up the prints and the cuts. Which is different than any of these other technologies really that we’re talking about.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s not just automatic that you give it a picture of a dog and it knows to cut it out. The computers are not that smart yet. They don’t know what you want and they can’t just say, cut out a dog for me and it will figure it out. You’ve got to be able to know how to do it. Then also just understand some basics of graphic design and when you would want to cut things out and how to separate parts of an image from another. I mean, there are some complexities. Again, not that hard to learn, but you’ve got to have the software to do it, graphic software, and you have to spend some time to learn how to do it.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. You got to learn it.
Marc Vila:
You got to learn it. It’s not automatic. I mean, from the beginning of this podcast, we were never in the automatic. But nothing is automatic. But this is going to be more than the Sawgrass, I would say, and then knowledge needed.
Mark Stephenson:
By the way, you’ll notice when we do our demonstrations of any of this equipment, except for maybe on the Graphtec, we are rarely actually creating the designs. We’re mostly printing or cutting or producing the designs, showing you the equipment and application to the shirt or the material or whatever it is. That’s because we’re not in the CorelDRAW business. We’re in the equipment and end result business. If we want a design done, we send it to ColDesi Graphics. We give the idea of the picture and say, “Hey, get this ready for a Roland print and cut or for sublimation or for white toner or DTG.” Or something like that. We handle the graphics. We’re not showing you the graphics. We’re showing you the application as easy as we can get it.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean, we’re in the business of equipment, not in graphics. I think that’s the perfect way to say it. Or at least not in training people how to use graphics and in selling graphics software. We sell equipment and the software to run the equipment. We have a graphic designer on our marketing team who helps us produce things. I don’t know how to do it. However, I’ve learned over the years how to do some basic stuff myself, so I could do some of the simpler things. Some of the more complicated things, I have to send out to get done. You’re going to have to make those decisions for your business. Are you going to be a graphics expert and learn how to do all this? Are you going to be able to do maybe 25% of it and pay somebody to do the other part? I mean, there’s plenty to be discussed there.
Mark Stephenson:
I feel like we should have called this podcast episode real talk about T-shirt printers.
Marc Vila:
Well, since we’re going to talk about printers, let’s move on to the next one.
Mark Stephenson:
Let’s please. The white toner transfer printers.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. We carry the Digital HeatFX systems, is what we have. We call it the system because it’s generally made up of a UniNet or a CRIO printer. But as we already said, the printer is not everything. We have a whole episode talking about this stuff.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. By the way, before it was called CRIO, those were called OKI printers,
Marc Vila:
OKI printers. Just the new USA branding of what they want to call that brand and that company.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. White toner printers, it’s a very descriptive term. The difference between a color laser printer or a color copier is normally they print a combination of CMYK, which is cyan, yellow, magenta, and black to make a beautiful array of colors. If you just use those, you’re pretty much in the same situation as sublimation. Because they don’t use white ink, you can’t apply it to a dark substrate. White toner, most of the time substitutes the black toner for white. You put that white in there, and now it lays down a white toner layer and then it prints the color on top. That’s kind of the fundamentals of what we’re talking about when we talk about white toner.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a reasonably newer technology compared to everything else we’ve discussed. But they have been around for a while to have tons of these printers out in the market, all over the world. It’s a proven technology.
Mark Stephenson:
It’s ColDesi’s most popular technology.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s one of the most popular technologies worldwide in growth, for sure. The cost of a system like this is going to be, we said about $3,700 to about $15,000, or somewhere around 100 to 400 a month. A very broad range.
Mark Stephenson:
Which is most infuriating answer that we give.
Marc Vila:
Yeah, it is. It infuriating.
Mark Stephenson:
It really is.
Marc Vila:
But I mean, it’s-
Mark Stephenson:
How much is a Digital HeatFX system? I don’t know. It’s between-
Marc Vila:
Massive.
Mark Stephenson:
… 4,000 and $15,000.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. There’s a lot of products that are like that and we don’t … Even, I mean, a phone nowadays, how much does it cost to buy a phone? I don’t know. Free or three grand.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah, exactly. Somewhere in between.
Marc Vila:
How much is a car? 500 to 5 million. This is just one of those, there’s a lot of options, a lot of choices. This is why you want to talk to one of the experts to find out what you need. We have a whole episode on it, so I think what I would say is, we can go a little light on the description and quick on the pros and cons and recommend listening to the whole episode because there’s a lot of information.
Mark Stephenson:
I agree. I do want to bracket the prices in the middle though and say, most people spend between about eight and 12,000.
Marc Vila:
Okay, great. I think that’s good.
Mark Stephenson:
The pros of-
Marc Vila:
The pros.
Mark Stephenson:
… the white toner printer. Yeah.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. I mean we’re full color printing, so that’s great. Just like we talked about the Roland and the sublimation. Except it’s toner, so it’s fast. Super fast to print. Significantly faster than anything else because [crosstalk 00:52:18]-
Mark Stephenson:
I mean, I got to stop you. It looks great. If you wrote down everything that you would want in a T-shirt transfer printer, then white toner would click the boxes.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It checks a lot of boxes and it’s not a liquid system. It’s a toner system. That brings the maintenance way, way, way down
Mark Stephenson:
Toner is a powder, by the way. Toner is a powder.
Marc Vila:
It’s a powder. It’s like ground up plastic almost. It’s a super fine powder and that just means that there’s no liquid. Which means there’s significantly less maintenance. You can just turn the printer off and let it sit there for a while and turn it back on and print 100 shirts and then turn it off again.
Mark Stephenson:
I’ve got a Brother laser printer here next to me that I use twice a year. All I do is turn it on and it prints and that’s because it’s a toner printer.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s because it’s a toner printer, so you don’t have to worry about printhead clogs and lines and banding. All that stuff is generally just not the same issue with the liquid. You’ve got the versatility like you did with the Roland, so you can do lights and darks and cotton and polyester. It’s just extremely versatile in what you can do. You can do hard goods as well.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Like coasters and-
Marc Vila:
Wood-
Mark Stephenson:
… glass.
Marc Vila:
… glass. Yeah. It’s really versatile there. A benefit over the sublimation and one of the pros, is it doesn’t require any special coatings. You literally can go to a craft store or your wood shop and cut out a shape of a baseball and put a kid’s name on it and you don’t need any special coding or prep. You could just do it straight up on a piece of wood or on a piece of glass. It’s very cool.
Mark Stephenson:
Let’s say that again. If you wanted to take a Sawgrass and you wanted to make coffee mugs, let’s say for example, then you would need to get sublimation, sublimation ready, or sublimatable coffee bags. I just didn’t know how to say that. Because what they do is kind of they bond the ceramic and the coffee mug with a polyester base that makes the sublimation work with it like a polyester T-shirt. But if you went and got a mug from Walmart that wasn’t specifically poly, even if it was white, then the sublimation, it wouldn’t take. It wouldn’t look good. It would wash right off. It would be a disaster.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. On the Digital HeatFX, you don’t need any special coding. No, I mean, there’s going to be limitations and there’s not enough time to go into all that. But generally speaking, if the material can be heated up because you heat apply, if the material can be heated up and you can get it in a heat press, you can just about put a Digital HeatFX transfer onto it. Which is very cool. There’s different papers and stuff like that. There’s a whole episode on this if I didn’t mention that a couple times.
Mark Stephenson:
Did you?
Marc Vila:
I recommend it. I recommend it.
Mark Stephenson:
Should we link to that in the notes or something like that?
Marc Vila:
I don’t know how to do links on the internet. It’ll be in the notes. There are some cons. We should talk about that. Just like every system there is an economy of pros and cons that make things. We are now, I believe I would say it’s taking a next level up in the learning process. There are steps. It’s a little more fine tuned. I’ll be honest, with heat transfer vinyl, if you have a heat press and you accidentally set it to a temperature and put a T-shirt on it and just close it, you will probably have a finished shirt. You can accidentally get it on there. The range of the way it will work is a very, very large range.
Mark Stephenson:
Tolerant. It’s very tolerant.
Marc Vila:
The tolerance. It’s very, very tolerant. As you get to toner, that tolerance level shrinks down a bit more, and so it does require a little more precision. Not hard, but accurate. Not challenging, but accuracy is important.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. Not just in the process, in the physical process of peeling it and putting it on the heat press and how you apply it to the shirt and things like that, but also in the environment as well. Because part of the learning process is realizing that everything’s going to change a little bit if you are in a really humid or really dry environment. There are some adjustments that you make. Even after you’ve gone through training, it takes practice and it’s a skill that you develop. The payoff is worth it. The people that do a good job with Digital HeatFX, I mean honestly are just making tons of money. I’m not making that up.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s great. I had a conversation with one of our trainers who’s up in New Jersey and he was talking about that it was really freezing cold in the office when he got in there the first thing in the morning, and he had to raise his heat press up 10 degrees to do the transfers. Just because it was that cold in the room, it was cooling down everything. I mean, this is, like you said, the tolerance is something that is a little tighter. That’s a con. Not hard, but accurate is important. The toner and transfer paper also, it’s not as soft as other ways of printing shirts. Especially when you compare it to DTG sublimation or direct to film, which we’ll get into those next.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. It is more in keeping with putting the Roland, in putting a print and cut transfer onto a T-shirt.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. It’s closer to that. Vinyl is dependent. Vinyl is a little bit all over the place because there’s so many materials, but-
Mark Stephenson:
Why is that? What makes it less soft?
Marc Vila:
For one, the liquid inks in general will produce a softer transfer on a shirt. The liquid generally when it’s finished, it’s almost like rubber in a way. If you take some DTG ink that’s been coagulated in a bottle that’s old, if you pull out, I felt that stuff. It feels like a little rubber ball. It gets rubbery. The ink kind of dries like that. Toner and the polymers on that are going to dry a little more closer to paper than rubber. They’re not as flexible. They’re not going to stretch as much. The stretch and return is not as much. There’s some there to a degree, but not nearly as much as say like a DFT or sublimation for various reasons.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. Now let’s specify here that you can do designs with white toner printing that can be incredibly soft.
Marc Vila:
Yes.
Mark Stephenson:
Right. You can. I mean the right design with plenty of white space doing logos and things like that, it’ll feel great. I’ve got, and I know you do too, I’ve got white toner transfer printed shirts that I’ve had for years and they feel terrific.
Marc Vila:
Absolutely. I think it just goes to level one on the con or the first thing you mentioned, the cons. Is the precision in the learning. If you’ve taken the time to learn how to do it and learn the graphics and you build together a shirt that makes sense with the graphic and the process of making it, your finished good is amazing. If you do it wrong or you skip steps or you don’t know how to edit your graphic in a good way, then you could get a finished product that’s not as soft as, say, if you were to have done it in sublimation. I think that’s a learning curve thing. Where in sublimation, you could take a picture of a dog, send it to your printer, put it on a shirt and it will feel great. It might not look perfect yet because you didn’t do any graphic arts, but it will feel amazing. If you did that with the Digital HeatFX, it’s going to feel like you have a transfer on a shirt. If you did that with a Roland, the same thing.
Mark Stephenson:
I think this is one of those trade-offs where we say there’s no perfect printer, it’s just what’s best for your business. I think white toner transfer printers are very close to being perfect, but you are trading the ability to take a transfer and put it on virtually any fabric and virtually any color. You’re trading the ability to do that with maybe the permanence and the softness of a sublimation print. Because you won’t get it that way with the Roland and you won’t get it that way with white transfer. You’re trading that versatility of color and material for those other factors.
Marc Vila:
Yeah.
Mark Stephenson:
Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to what turned out to be part one of two podcasts on the 2022 price and feature survey of what the best T-shirt printers are on the market.
Marc Vila:
Yeah. All this information will be continued with the other half of the list in a part two episode. We just broke this up just to make it a little bit more digestible so you didn’t have to have an hour and a half to two hour long episode about this. But it’s all great information and stay tuned for the next episode to wrap it up.
Mark Stephenson:
Yeah. If you want to, just let this one roll into the next one.
Marc Vila:
There you go. Perfect.
The post Episode 163 – How Much Does it Cost? 2022 T-Shirt Printer Options (Part 1) appeared first on Custom Apparel Startups.
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