What's the Difference? | Sublimation, White Toner Transfers & Direct to Garment Printing

What's the Difference? | Sublimation, White Toner Transfers & Direct to Garment Printing

So first of all, all three of these technologies produce amazing prints. Second, they're all designed to make you profitable, whether you're printing one t-shirt or 50 or more t-shirts. And third, you can get them all at ColDesi. But there are a few major differences that we should talk about.

The first major difference is going to be cost of equipment. So, most people spend anywhere from a thousand to $2,500 on sublimation equipment. For the DigitalHeat FX System or white toner printers, people can spend anywhere from six up to $15,000. And for DTG printing people spend anywhere from 20 thousand to $25,000. But financing is available on all the equipment.

So, let's jump into the next difference, which is going to be the process of creating each of these t-shirts.

For sublimation, you're just going to print your graphic on your sublimation paper, then you can head over to your heat press, and you can place your printed transfer right onto your t-shirt and heat press it. After it's done, your transfer will just come right off and your t-shirt's finished.

The DigitalHeat FX System is similar to sublimation in the sense that you're not printing directly onto your t-shirt. So, this is a two-step system. So we're going to heat apply a B sheet of paper that contains polymer to this printed transfer. Then after we do that, we can apply that transfer to our t-shirt. The t-shirt then needs to cool completely. We can rip off the transfer, but then we have to go ahead and do a finishing press.

Now, direct-to-garment printing, with the DTG G4, is different than DigitalHeat FX and sublimation because we're printing our graphic directly onto our t-shirt. But first we are going to have to pre-treat our shirt, then we'll have to dry our pretreat with our heat press, and when this is done, we can lay our t-shirt right onto our DTG G4 and print our graphic. But this ink is not yet dry. So, we'll have to take the shirt over to our heat press and give it a finishing press as well.

Watch a full DTG product run here:    • DTG G4 | Full Production Run of 12 Cu...  

Now the sublimation print only costs about 30 cents to produce, so if you're in the white polyester t-shirt business, then sublimation is the way to go. But the advantage with DigitalHeat FX, while this may cost a little more to produce, you are able to print on white and black poly as well as cotton.

Watch the DigitalHeat FX System, with the OKI pro8432, in action here:    • OKI pro8432WT White Toner Printer | C...  

Now, the DTG print costs and feels the same as the sublimation print, but you're able to do amazing prints on white poly, as well as light and dark colored cotton.

Other than white polyester t-shirts, sublimation also has the ability to decorate hard goods, like key chains and other promotional products that have a special polyester coating.

DigitalHeat FX is a super versatile system where you can decorate hard surfaces like mugs, wood, aluminum, and a lot more. Watch us customize colorful mugs here:    • How To Make Custom Mugs | DigitalHeat...  

With DTG printing, you can print on some hard goods, just not the range that you can with sublimation or DigitalHeat FX.

Now, again, all three of these machines produce amazing quality prints, and they're all versatile in their own ways. But it's all about determining what's going to be best for you and your business. You can learn even more about the pros and cons of each system in this article - https://coldesi.com/2021/03/sublimati...

So go ahead and visit https://coldesi.com/ and you can live chat with one of our pros and they'll help you out. Thanks for watching.