Screen, DTG, DTF or sublimation: choosing a decoration method

Most buyers pick a decoration method by habit, then discover on delivery that it was the wrong one for the fabric. The choice is actually determined by four things: the fabric, the quantity, the number of colours, and how the garment should feel.

Here is what each method is genuinely good at.

The four options at a glance

Method	Best fabric	Best quantity	Colours	Hand-feel
Screen	Cotton, blends	Higher	Few, solid	Depends on ink
DTG	Cotton	Low	Unlimited, photographic	Soft
DTF	Almost anything	Low to medium	Unlimited	Slight film
Sublimation	Polyester only	Any	Unlimited	None at all

Screen printing

Ink is pushed through a mesh screen, one screen per colour. It is the oldest method and still the right answer for most bulk apparel.

Where it wins: solid, punchy colour, and cost at volume. Once the screens are made, each additional garment is cheap.

Where it loses: setup. Every colour needs its own screen, so a six-colour design carries six setups whether you print 300 pieces or 3,000. On a small run with many colours the setup dominates the price.

The ink choice matters as much as the method:

• Plastisol sits on the fabric. Opaque, durable, and heavy if the coverage is large — a big plastisol slab feels like a sticker and moves like one.
• Water-based sinks into the fibre. Softer hand, less opaque on dark grounds.
• Discharge removes the garment dye and replaces it with pigment, so the print becomes part of the cloth. Excellent hand on dark cotton, and it only works on reactive-dyed 100% cotton.

DTG — direct to garment

An inkjet printer, printing straight onto the garment.

Where it wins: photographic and highly detailed artwork, unlimited colours, and no setup cost — which makes it the only sensible option for very small runs or one-offs.

Where it loses: speed and fabric range. It is slow per piece, so it does not scale. It needs a cotton-rich fabric and a pre-treatment, and on dark garments the white underbase adds cost and stiffness. On polyester it is generally the wrong tool.

DTF — direct to film

The design is printed onto a film, powdered with adhesive, cured and heat-pressed onto the garment.

Where it wins: it does not care much what the fabric is. Cotton, polyester, blends, dark grounds, awkward textures — DTF handles them, holds fine detail, and needs no screens.

Where it loses: hand-feel. The design sits on the surface as a thin film, and on a large coverage area you can feel it. It has become the default for small and medium runs across mixed fabric types, which is deserved, but it is not invisible.

Sublimation

Heat turns dye into gas, which bonds with polyester fibre. The print becomes the fabric.

Where it wins: there is no hand-feel at all — nothing sits on top, so the garment breathes exactly as it did before. Unlimited colours, and it will not crack or peel because there is nothing to crack.

Where it loses: it works on polyester only, and on light grounds only. Dye cannot lighten fabric, so a design on a dark garment is not possible. This is why sportswear uses it and cotton retail does not.

Related trap: printing plastisol on polyester without a blocker base. Disperse dye can migrate into the ink over time, so a white print on a red polyester tee turns pink months later. Sportswear specification covers that in more detail.

Choosing, in order

1. What is the fabric? Polyester rules out DTG and plain plastisol; it points at sublimation or DTF.
2. How many pieces? Below a couple of hundred, screen setup is hard to justify. Above a thousand, it is hard to beat.
3. How many colours? Photographic or many-coloured artwork rules out screen on cost. Two solid colours makes screen the obvious answer.
4. How should it feel? If the garment is sold on being nice to wear, avoid heavy plastisol coverage and consider discharge or water-based.
5. Light or dark ground? Dark rules out sublimation entirely.

The step nobody should skip

Wash-test the decoration on the pre-production sample. Five domestic cycles, then look at it.

Cracking, peeling, fading and dye migration all appear in the wash and none appear at inspection. It is the cheapest insurance in the process, and the failures that lose repeat customers are overwhelmingly the ones that only show up after laundering.

Get the tested sample signed and keep it. It is your reference if bulk arrives different.

One practical note on where the printing happens: in a cluster like Tirupur decoration is often a specialist unit rather than the garment factory itself, which is fine as long as somebody tells you so before the order rather than after a wash test fails.

If you are still working out who is doing the printing — in-house or subcontracted — that belongs in the same set of questions as everything else in the wider sourcing guide.

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We run screen, DTG, DTF, sublimation, puff, high-density and discharge printing plus computerised embroidery in our own unit in Tirupur, and we wash-test before bulk print runs as standard. Send us your artwork and we will tell you which method the garment actually wants — including when the cheaper one is the right answer. Programmes start at 300 pieces per style per colour.