What is screen printing?
Screen printing pushes ink through a fine mesh screen stencilled with your artwork, one screen and one pass per colour. Setup is per colour; once the screens exist, each additional garment costs almost nothing to print. It is the oldest method and still the standard for volume.
Why it matters
Above roughly 150 pieces with one to four colours, nothing is cheaper per piece or more durable. It is also the only route to puff, metallic, discharge and other special inks.
On our floor
Screens are exposed in-house, so a design change between sample and bulk costs a day. Each screen carries a setup of around $30 from our current rate sheet; a one-colour chest print adds about $0.90 per piece at 50 and falls steeply from there.
Common questions
- How many colours can be screen printed?
- Up to eight per design on our presses. Each is a screen and a setup, so simpler artwork is cheaper.
- Can screen printing do photographs?
- Only through halftone dots, which is demanding and expensive. Use DTG or DTF for photographic artwork.
- Plastisol or water-based?
- Plastisol for opacity and durability on dark garments and workwear; water-based or discharge for the softest finish on cotton.
- Is it cheaper than DTF?
- Above about 150 pieces with simple artwork, usually by a wide margin. Below that, DTF has no setup and wins.
Related terms
plastisol ink
Plastisol is the standard screen-printing ink: a PVC-based ink that sits on the fabric surface and cures under heat into a durable, opaque…
water-based ink
Water-based ink carries its pigment in water rather than PVC, so it soaks into cotton fibre instead of sitting on top. The print is soft,…
discharge printing
Discharge printing uses an ink that bleaches the garment's own dye out of the fabric where the design sits, then replaces it with pigment.…
halftone
A halftone breaks a continuous tone — a gradient, a shadow, a photograph — into dots of varying size so that one ink colour can appear…
Where this applies
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