Every printed t-shirt you own was made one of two ways. The difference is not a detail of manufacturing: it decides what the artwork can look like, how the shirt feels, and how the print ages. Here is what actually separates them.
Screen printing lays ink on top
A screen is a fine mesh stretched on a frame, blocked everywhere except where the ink should pass. The printer pushes thick plastisol ink through that opening onto the fabric, then cures it at around 160 degrees Celsius. The ink sits on the surface of the cotton as a thin plastic film.
One screen carries one colour. A design in five colours needs five screens, five passes and five alignments. That is why screen printed shirts tend to use flat blocks of colour and hard edges: it is what the process is good at, and every extra colour costs another screen.
What you get: dense, opaque colour, very strong on dark fabric, and a print you can feel with your fingertip. What you give up: gradients, photographs, soft transitions, and small runs. Setting up five screens for one shirt makes no sense, which is why screen printing lives on runs of fifty pieces and up.
Direct to garment prints into the fibre
A DTG printer works like an inkjet aimed at cloth. Water-based ink is sprayed straight into the cotton fibres and fixed with heat. There is no screen, no colour separation and no minimum run. The file goes to the machine and the machine prints it.
Because the ink is absorbed rather than deposited, the print breathes and stays soft. Run a hand over a DTG print and you feel cotton, not plastic. It also means there is no colour limit: a photograph, a watercolour, a smoke gradient with a thousand tones prints as easily as a logo.
On a dark shirt the printer first lays a white underbase, because water-based ink is translucent and would vanish into black cotton. That underbase is what lets a pale drawing read on a black tee.
Which one lasts longer
Honestly: a well cured screen print on a well chosen fabric survives more abuse. It is a plastic film, and plastic is tough. Its failure mode is characteristic, though. It cracks. Once the film starts to split, usually where the shirt is stretched most, it splits progressively and cannot be repaired.
A DTG print does not crack, because there is no film to crack. It fades. Washed hot, or tumbled dry hot, or turned right side out against the drum, it loses density gradually and evenly. Washed cold and inside out, it will still be there when the collar has gone.
How to tell which one you are holding
- Stretch the print gently. A screen print resists and shows a slight sheen. A DTG print stretches with the cloth and stays matte.
- Look at a fine detail against the light. DTG follows the weave and you can see the texture of the cotton through the colour. Screen printing covers the weave.
- Count the colours. More than four, with soft transitions, is almost always DTG.
What we use, and why
Every Rippwiller piece is printed direct to garment. That is not a compromise, it is the condition for the work we sell. A smoke drawing has thousands of grey values, a hand-lettered poster has anti-aliased edges, a graffiti bear runs a rainbow through a single outline. None of that survives being separated into four screens.
It also means we can print one shirt. Not fifty. One, for one person, after that person ordered it, which is the whole point of how this label works.