The art of coming up with your own creative designs to be proudly displayed across any given garment is hardly new – folk have been printing their own designs for years. And technically it’s a pretty easy thing to do as well, requiring little more than a standard home printer and a few sheets of iron-on printing paper to get up and running.
However, there’s something of a swing happening in the opposite direction right now as more and more people head back to the open arms of the professional t-shirt printing service to do the job on their behalf. On the surface this may appear to amount to little more than taking a rather large step in the wrong direction, though does in fact make a great deal more sense than might be apparent.
Is there really anything to gain from going pro when the job can be done at home for next to nothing? Is there any sense in paying for something you could probably take care of with what you already have?
Funnily enough, the answer is ‘yes’!
Quality
For one thing, it’s worth bearing in mind that the very best printing services on the market today aren’t in the habit of using just a standard home Epson to get the job done. The kinds of printers used for pro garment printing are expensive…as in VERY…expensive and all this money goes into a piece of kit that’s massively better-suited to printing items of clothing than a home printer used for little more than occasional Word documents. As a result, no matter how daring, complex or colourful the design you come up with is, you can guarantee it will be reproduced much more accurately by a professional printing service. So if you plan on wearing your creation with pride, there really is no comparison between the two options.
Technology
Something else to consider while on the subject is the technology being used to print the garments you’re looking for. If you print at home, the best you can hope for is a pretty remedial piece of transfer paper, a bog-standard print job and an iron. By contrast, send the job off the pros and you could make use of the latest direct to garment printing technology which, as the name suggests, sees the design printed directly onto the fabric. This result is a final article that looks, feels and pretty much is as good as any high-quality garment on sale in any store. So once again, there really is no realistic comparison between the two options.
Longevity
It’s all well and good to come up with a decent enough home-printed t-shirt using the bits and pieces you already have, but what about when the time comes to give it a good clean? For the fledgling home designer, there’s really nothing quite as soul-destroying as spending hours, days or weeks on a design only for it to then be wholly laid to waste the very moment it makes any kind of contact with water. From peeling transfer sheets to bleeding colours to warping to fading and really anything else along similarly undesirable lines, chances are you’d prefer your prized new t-shirt not to fall to pieces as soon as it needs to be cleaned. The alternative is of course never to wash the thing at all, but chances are you wouldn’t get away with this while living in civil society. By contrast, a pro-printed t-shirt from the best in the business is durable, long-lasting and generally well-made enough to be treated like any other garment you’ve ever bought.
Price
Last up, while it’s probably safe to say that pro t-shirt printing doesn’t come quite as cheap as a home printing effort, things aren’t necessarily quite as black-and-white as they appear. For one thing, the t-shirts themselves don’t come free of charge and neither does the transfer paper. Printer ink also costs a small fortune and these are the kinds of endeavours that often result in a fair few aborted attempts prior to getting it right. And what’s more, there’s simply no way on Earth a cheap home t-shirt printing effort is going to result in a garment that has the same kind of lifespan as a comparable garment sourced from a pro printing house. So while it may appear that the savings are both huge and immediate, in terms of overall value for money it might not be the most profitable idea to cut so many corners.