# Break Even Point



## Earl Smith (Sep 30, 2008)

Has anybody worked out at which point a DTG printer looses its advantage over a screen printer? 
It costs the same to print one shirt on a DTG as it does to print 100. ( Forget the cost of Artwork for the DTG). 
Screen printers have to make 4 screens ( or more) set them up, print and wash them out afterwards. 
When printing a typical 4 colour design. Where does it become cost effective to say no to DTG and farm the work out to a screen printer?? How many shirts???
Earl


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## YoDan (May 4, 2007)

Earl
Back in my DTG printing days and also being a screen printer, I started just my samples, one off's, than I increased my numbers doing runs of 75 or less and even more of the photo type designs, after that I found how easy it was compared to making and cleaning all those darn screens so I just about did all my work with the exception of one color or even up to 4 color runs and of course the 300/500 shirt runs, my printer could do up to four(4) shirts at once and I really enjoyed doing the 16 x 20 photo prints on canvas which made a very good money return.
*Cheers! Beers are on Peter, anywhere, anytime.
*
Dan
_*"HAPPY PRINTING"*_


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## zoom_monster (Sep 20, 2006)

If you are "farming it out" it should be a lot easier for you to figure out.

I did a wholesale bid for white shirts about a month ago for 4CP on the front. I was able to beat out the screen price up to 120 shirts when weighed agaist the screens/print price, more if including the seps in the calulations. 

By the way, I ended up loosing the bid, because the guy called me back and said.."by the way they want to add a one color back". In screening, that adds 1 set-up and about .65 per imprint, In DTG that doubles my labor expense... basically doubling the cost to that client(wholesale), so you see that it "just depends" on several factors as to where that threshold is.


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## JeridHill (Feb 8, 2006)

I did a 100 piece order full color on the back full color on the front, left chest, white garments using 2 heat presses. The total time including art was 4 hours. My guess is, a typical screen printer could not do this order in that amount of time. That being said, a larger scaled printer could easily do this, the quality wouldn't be as good, but oftentimes, larger companies have screens already made and ready to burn. They have offline registration systems for auto presses. All of these combined, they could probably turn this job out in 2 to 3 hours, boxed and ready to go.

It does depend on who you are up against.


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