DTF vs Screen Printing on Joggers
By The Velocity Wear Team
DTF prints your artwork onto film and transfers it to the garment, so colour count costs nothing and setup is minimal. Screen printing pushes ink through one screen per colour, which costs more to set up and far less per piece once the run is long. On joggers the decision usually turns on how many colours the design has and how many pairs you are ordering.
What does colour count do to each method?
To screen printing, everything. Each colour is its own screen, its own setup charge and its own pass through the press. A four-colour leg graphic is four of each, which is why printers push buyers to simplify artwork before quoting. Done well, that simplification usually improves the design as well as the price.
To DTF, nothing at all. The film is printed as a full-colour image, so a photograph costs the same to transfer as a single-colour wordmark. That makes it the obvious route for gradients, photographic elements and complex multi-colour work that screen printing would struggle to separate cleanly. Our DTF printing service page sets out how the process runs.
Which is better value at fifty pieces, and at a thousand?
At fifty, DTF is frequently ahead, because there is barely any setup to recover and the per-piece cost is what it is. A three-colour design on a short run can cost less by DTF than by screen even though screen ink itself is cheaper, simply because three screens have to be paid for either way.
At a thousand the position reverses hard. Screen setup is now split across a thousand garments and the remaining cost per piece is small, while DTF costs close to the same on the thousandth piece as on the first. Anyone planning repeat runs of the same artwork should look at the screen route even if the first run is short, and the tiers that shape the garment price sit alongside it on the wholesale joggers page.
How do they differ in hand feel on a jogger?
A DTF transfer is a continuous film bonded to the fabric. Over a small mark you barely notice it. Over a large leg panel it is a sheet, and it moves slightly differently from the knit around it, which is more noticeable on bottoms than on a chest because legs bend constantly.
Screen ink sits in and on the fibres rather than as a sheet, and with a soft-hand process a large printed area stays flexible. On brushed fleece both methods have to contend with nap: DTF bonds over it, screen ink needs an underbase to stop the nap showing through. Neither is a problem, but the resulting surfaces are different enough to be worth seeing on a sample at £150, credited against the bulk order.
So which should you pick?
Pick DTF when the artwork has four or more colours, contains a gradient or a photograph, when the run is at or near the fifty-piece minimum, or when you want to test several designs without committing to screens for each. It is also the pragmatic choice when artwork is still being finalised late in the calendar.
Pick screen printing when the design is one to three flat colours, when the quantity is in the hundreds or thousands, when the print covers a large area and you want it to feel like part of the garment, or when the same artwork will be repeated across future runs. Method choice against position and fabric is covered in print or embroider wholesale joggers, and file requirements for transfers in what 300 DPI actually means.
