What to look for in high quality prints from a direct to garment printer.
What is the Best Direct to Garment Printer for Print Quality
Not all direct to garment printers print alike. We will show you what makes a great print and how you can tell the difference when shopping for the perfect direct to garment printers.
The DTG brand has always been known for being the best direct to garment printer for print quality, and since the invention of the M2 that reputation has grown even more.
All of today’s t shirt printing machines do a good job printing t shirts. While some make you pay dearly for each print because of ink pricing (you can read here how DTG brand has the lowest cost per print), they all produce a sellable shirt.
The top brands that normally compete for the best direct to garment printer title are DTG (M2), Brother DTG, and Anajet. We also looked at a smaller brand (Freejet) and the new printer from M&R. All are built from the ground up for t shirt printing as opposed to the old style modified paper printers. All do best printing on cottons. All can print with white ink.
Differences between the printers include everything that influences just how good the print can be. They boil down into 3 things:
- Mechanical – The print engine and print head choices by the manufacturers.
- Software – Is a RIP included or is it optional.
- Ink/Pretreatment – What brand/kind of dtg printer ink does it use?
We collected real samples from each company at a recent tradeshow and did a side by side comparison of the print quality. The results show the M2 from ColDesi as the clear winner over Anajet, Brother DTG and Freejet. The M&R direct to garment printer was very close to equal with a beautiful print, but at an estimated $75,000 price tag you could literally put 3 DTG M2s in your shop instead.
Why is the M2 the Best Direct to Garment Printer for Print Quality?
Every M2 owner has an advantage against most of their competitors with DTG Printers because when you buy a DTG brand printer, you ALWAYS get the RIP software. RIP Pro c6 allows you to adjust underbase and color ink levels so you get the BEST print from the least amount of ink. It also allows you to save those settings you can print just as beautifully, just as profitably, next time.
Each M2 also comes loaded with Genuine DTG Inks.
- Job Costing Tools
You can set your ink costs, substrate costs, surface treatment costs, labor costs, and even overhead percentages and RIP Pro will give you the complete price of an image IN ADVANCE of your printing.
The job costing tools provide accurate quotes for larger jobs.
- Powerful Compress Designer Software
Compress Designer software is an important part of the problem-solving capabilities of our UV Printer lineup.
Compress Designer works between your graphics application where you create the art and your Compress Rip software to refine printing.
With this uv printer software you can create a kind of software jig for small run or one off jobs by setting up to print a white, built up outline of the item onto the bed. You also have a wide variety of tools including the ability to do variable data – very powerful! And it’s included with every Compress iUV600s and Compress iUV1200s
- Built-in Automatic and Manual Graphic Processes
Rotate any graphic, dynamically resize, make color changes or remove the object color (or any other color) to allow your substrate to show through. Speed up your workflow by taking control of your images right inside the RIP.
Executing these kinds of processes within the UV printing machine software instead of your graphics application saves time! It can also keep you from having to go back to your customer to make simple changes.
