I'm doing a bit of futurology here, but I really believe that the days of printing vinyl to personalise clothes are numbered.
The adoption of DTF by so many printers is a great harbinger of this paradigm shift in low-cost garment printing.
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Flex printing was one of the favourite methods for decorating clothes with low quantities, many colours and at low cost. It was, I repeat.
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Flex has always had some problems which, due to the way it is produced, would be difficult to overcome and for the technique to evolve favourably.
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Ecology
We'll start with ecology and the waste generated in production, but first we need to define what this vinyl is. This is a roll of coloured plastic (usually white to allow for printing) which is painted with the image the customer wants.
Flex in this field is a disgrace. The rolls are about 50cm long and in normal situations, up to 50 per cent of this roll can be waste. Almost an environmental crime.
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High amount of manual labour
Taking the above, the vinyl is printed and cut mechanically with another machine. This second machine usually has a blade that cuts the image.
However, after this superficial cut, you'll need someone to "unpick" the image with tweezers. This is very meticulous work and can sometimes take hours for a single production.
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Loss of detail
Given the way the image is normally cut, any small details (texts and logos) end up being lost because the blades are simply incapable of making millimetre cuts. There are no ways round this problem today, apart from creating a border around the image (which nobody likes).
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The DTF completely eliminates these three problems.
By using smaller rolls that are recyclable, waste is also considerably reduced;
Manual labour is reduced to cutting the roll into individual pieces, something that is much quicker to do and with much less room for error;
As there are no cuts to be made to the printed image, the loss of detail is also greatly reduced. DTF can create extremely small details that don't need cutting.
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From the point of view of the writer of this article, DTF will be a far superior alternative to flex printing and will - soon - almost completely eliminate the supply of this method of printing clothes.
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