DTF vs Screen Printing on Polo Shirts
By The Velocity Wear Team
DTF prints your artwork in full colour onto a film and transfers it to the shirt, so colour count costs nothing and a short run is no more awkward than a long one. Screen printing pushes ink through one screen per colour, which makes it cheap at volume and expensive in detail. The split is colour count and quantity.
How does colour count change the price?
Under screen printing it changes everything. Each colour is a separate screen, a separate film and a separate pass through the press, so a two-colour badge and a six-colour illustration are very different jobs. Under DTF the artwork is printed as one full-colour image, so a photograph costs the same to transfer as a single-colour wordmark. If your design has more than about three colours, DTF stops being the alternative and becomes the obvious answer.
Which one suits a short run?
DTF, clearly. There are no screens to burn, so the fixed cost at the front of the job is small and fifty pieces is a perfectly sensible quantity. Screen printing carries its setup whatever the run length, so at the 50-piece minimum that cost is spread thinly and the per-piece figure looks high. Push the same job to five hundred or a thousand and the screen setup all but disappears while the DTF cost stays roughly proportional to the number of pieces. Volume bands apply to the garment underneath either way, reaching up to 35% below the fifty-piece price — see the pricing page.
What is the difference in the hand?
Both sit on the surface, but they feel different. A screen print with a light ink deposit can feel almost soft, and on flat colour at a sensible coverage it settles into the cloth well. DTF produces a continuous film across the whole printed area, so a large solid graphic has more presence under the fingers than the equivalent screen print. On a small mark nobody notices; on a design covering most of a chest panel, they do. On textured piqué in particular, sit a DTF transfer where the hand will not constantly find it.
What does the polo body do to the decision?
Piqué is textured, so very fine detail on either method softens slightly at the edge. Smooth performance knits give both a cleaner result, and synthetic-heavy fabrics behave differently under heat, which is worth raising before the artwork is approved rather than after. The placket constrains placement for both equally — the chest mark sits left of the buttons and the back yoke is the largest clear area on the garment. More on cloth choice is in choosing fabric for wholesale polo shirts. Details of our DTF process are on the DTF printing page.
So which do you pick?
Pick DTF when the artwork is full colour, photographic or gradient-heavy, when the run is near the 50-piece minimum, or when several versions of a design have to be produced within one order. Pick screen printing when the design is one to three flat colours, when the run is several hundred pieces or more, and when hand feel across a large printed area matters. If the mark is small and the shirt is a uniform that will be washed hard, neither is the right answer and you want embroidery — the case for that is in screen printing vs embroidery on polo shirts. The garment options behind all three sit on the wholesale polo shirts page.
