DTF vs DTG vs Screen vs Sublimation: The Complete Apparel Printing Comparison

Every week someone sends us artwork and asks for “t-shirt printing”, as though that were one thing. It is not. There are four production technologies in common use, they behave completely differently, and choosing the wrong one is the single most common reason an apparel order disappoints — either because it costs twice what it should, or because the print cracks off after a season.

This guide is the internal decision tree our production team uses, written out. No method is presented as best, because none is. What matters is the interaction between four variables: your artwork, your fabric, your quantity and how long the garment has to survive.

Why the method decides everything

A printing method is not a finish applied to a garment. It is a physical process that changes the fabric. Screen printing lays a measurable layer of plastisol or water-based ink on top of the fibres. Sublimation converts solid dye to gas and bonds it inside the polymer chain of a polyester fibre. DTG sprays water-based pigment into cotton, and on dark fabric it must first lay down a white underbase that changes the hand-feel forever.

Those are not marketing differences. They determine:

• Hand-feel — whether the wearer can feel the print with a fingertip.
• Breathability — a solid plastisol block does not breathe; sublimated dye does.
• Stretch recovery — a rigid print on a stretchy fabric will crack at the shoulders first.
• Colour range — some methods reach neon and metallic, most do not.
• Unit economics — some methods charge you once per design, others once per piece.

The right question is never “which is the best printing method”. It is “which method makes this artwork survive this fabric for this many washes at this quantity”.

DTF — direct to film

DTF prints your artwork in CMYK plus white onto a PET transfer film, dusts it with a hot-melt adhesive powder, cures the powder, and then heat-presses the film onto the garment. The film peels away and leaves the print bonded to the fabric.

What DTF is genuinely good at

• No minimum. One piece costs the same per unit as fifty. There is no screen, no setup, no tooling.
• Any fabric. Cotton, polyester, blends, nylon, canvas, denim, fleece — the adhesive does not care what it is bonding to.
• Full colour with a white base built in. Gradients, photographs, drop shadows and fine detail all reproduce cleanly on black garments, which screen printing struggles with.
• Fast. A design can go from approved file to pressed garment in under an hour.

Where DTF falls down

• It sits on the fabric. A large solid block of DTF on a t-shirt has a noticeable film-like hand-feel and does not breathe.
• The unit price is flat. At 500 pieces you are still paying full price per print, which is where screen printing overtakes it dramatically.
• Large solid areas on stretchy fabric can crack if the garment is over-stretched repeatedly — sleeves on a compression fit, for example.
• Neon and metallic Pantones cannot be hit, because the process is CMYK.

DTG — direct to garment

DTG is, conceptually, an inkjet printer that prints onto a t-shirt. Water-based pigment ink is sprayed directly into the fibres. On light garments the ink goes straight down. On dark garments the machine first prints a white underbase, cures it, and then prints colour on top.

Strengths

• The softest hand-feel of any method on light cotton. The ink is in the fibre, not on it. On a white tee, a well-printed DTG graphic is almost undetectable by touch.
• Photographic detail. Skin tones, fine gradients, illustration with thousands of colours — DTG handles all of it.
• No minimum. One-off personalisation is economically viable.

Limitations that matter

• Cotton, or nothing much. DTG needs cellulose fibre to bond to. On 50/50 blends the colour shifts and dulls. On 100% polyester it fails outright.
• Pre-treatment is mandatory on darks, and it leaves a faint square halo around the print on some fabrics if applied poorly. This is the number one DTG quality complaint.
• Dark-garment prints fade first. The white underbase is the weak point; after 25–30 washes colours start looking chalky.
• Slow at volume. Each garment occupies the platen for 60–120 seconds. Two hundred pieces is a long day.

Screen printing

The oldest method here and still the most economically brutal at volume. A stencil (the screen) is made for each colour in the design. Ink is pushed through the mesh onto the garment, one colour per pass, then cured at around 160 °C.

Why volume buyers keep coming back

• The unit cost collapses. Once the screens exist, each additional print costs pennies of ink and a few seconds of press time.
• The thickest, most durable ink deposit available. A properly cured plastisol print outlives the garment. Workwear and uniform buyers choose it for exactly this reason.
• Real Pantone matching. Ink is mixed to the reference rather than simulated from CMYK, so neon, metallic, reflective and puff effects are all on the table.
• Speciality inks. Discharge (which removes the garment dye instead of covering it), high-density, glitter, glow — none of these exist in digital printing.

The costs nobody mentions upfront

• Setup per colour, per placement. A four-colour front and a one-colour back is five screens, five setups.
• Gradients are hard. They must be simulated with halftone dots, which limits how photographic the artwork can be.
• Colour changes mid-run cost money. Adding a second garment colour usually means adjusting the underbase.

Sublimation

Sublimation printing turns solid dye directly into gas under heat and pressure. The gas penetrates polyester fibre and re-solidifies inside it. The dye is not on the fabric — it is the fabric now.

What that buys you

• Zero hand-feel and zero weight. Nothing to crack, peel, or block airflow. This is why every serious sports jersey in the world is sublimated.
• Effectively permanent. The print fails when the fibre fails. There is no realistic wash count at which sublimation degrades.
• Unlimited colours at no extra cost, including full-bleed all-over graphics that run across seams if we cut and sew after printing.

The two hard constraints

• Polyester only. Cotton has nothing for the dye to bond to. On a 65/35 blend you get a faded, vintage look — sometimes desirable, usually not what was ordered.
• Light fabric only. Sublimation is a transparent dye process. You cannot print white, and you cannot print light colours onto a dark garment. On black polyester, sublimation is invisible.

For all-over prints we produce cut-and-sew sublimation: the fabric is printed on the roll, then the panels are cut and stitched. That is why a proper sublimated jersey has a graphic that continues perfectly across the side seam, and a heat-pressed one does not.

Vinyl and roll printing

Two more processes worth knowing, even though they rarely win a whole order on their own.

Vinyl (HTV) is coloured film cut to shape and heat-pressed. It is the correct answer for names and numbers on team kit, for single-colour text, and for reflective or flock finishes. It is a poor answer for anything with more than three colours, because each colour is a separate cut layer that has to be weeded and aligned by hand.

Garment roll printing is roll-to-roll printing before the fabric is cut. It is how all-over patterns, seamless repeats and engineered placements are made at scale. Minimum is measured in metres, not pieces, so it only makes sense for cut-and-sew production runs.

The cost curve, with numbers

Here is the shape of the problem, using indicative numbers for a standard 180 GSM cotton t-shirt with a single A4-size front print. Treat these as illustrative rather than a quotation — real pricing depends on artwork size, fabric and location.

The mechanism is simple. Screen printing has a high fixed cost and a very low variable cost. DTF and DTG have almost no fixed cost and a flat variable cost. The two lines cross, and for a two-colour front print on cotton that crossing point usually sits somewhere between 120 and 180 pieces. Add a second colour and the crossover moves later; add a second print location and it moves later again.

Durability: what 40 washes actually does

We wash-test every new combination of fabric, ink and method: 40 domestic cycles at 40 °C with standard detergent, tumble-dried, then assessed for colour change and crack. Summarised results across common combinations:

Two practical conclusions. First, if a garment has to look good for years — uniforms, workwear, club kit — sublimation or screen are the only two answers. Second, most “bad printing” complaints are actually curing failures. Plastisol that never reached 160 °C throughout will crack in ten washes no matter how good the artwork was, which is why we log cure temperature on every run.

Fabric compatibility table

One entry deserves a warning. Dye migration on polyester and poly-blends is the reason a white screen print on a red polyester tee can turn pink two weeks after delivery: the garment's own disperse dye sublimates under the curing heat and bleeds into the ink. It is preventable with a blocker base and a lower cure temperature, but only if we know the fabric composition before we print. Always tell your supplier the exact blend.

A decision framework you can use today

Answer these in order and you will land on the right method more than nine times out of ten.

1. Is the garment polyester and light coloured, and does the graphic need zero hand-feel or full-bleed coverage? → Sublimation. Stop here.
2. Is the quantity above roughly 150 pieces per design, with four or fewer flat colours? → Screen printing.
3. Is the artwork photographic or many-coloured, on 100% cotton, in a small run, and does hand-feel matter more than anything? → DTG.
4. Everything else → DTF. It is the most fabric-agnostic and quantity-agnostic process available, which is why it has taken over the small-run market.
5. Names, numbers or single-colour text on top of any of the above → add vinyl for the personalised element only.

Mixed methods on one garment are normal and often optimal: a screen-printed team crest with vinyl names and numbers is standard practice, because the crest is identical on 300 shirts and the names are not.

Five expensive mistakes

1. Ordering screen printing for 40 pieces. You pay for screens that never amortise. Below the crossover, digital wins every time.
2. Choosing DTG for dark garments in a corporate uniform order. The underbase will chalk long before the uniform cycle ends and you will re-order early.
3. Not declaring the fabric blend. Dye migration ruins runs that were technically printed perfectly.
4. Sending a 72 DPI logo scaled to 30 cm. No process invents detail that is not in the file. See our artwork preparation guide.
5. Skipping the physical sample. A screen proof on paper tells you nothing about how ink sits on a slub-knit fabric. We will not run bulk without a sample, and you should not accept a supplier who will.

Where to go from here

If you already know your quantity and fabric, put the numbers into the quote calculator and watch how the price moves as you change method — that alone teaches the economics faster than any article. If you are still choosing a base garment, read the fabric and GSM handbook next, because fabric constrains method more than most buyers expect.

And if you would rather just ask: send the artwork and the quantity to our production team. We will tell you which of the six technologies we would use and why — including the cases where the honest answer is “not this design on this fabric”.