Typical cost for an entry-level auto screen printing press is $34,000 and might produce 500 prints/hour with two employees. Tom: Typical cost for an entry-level manual screen printing press is about $5,000 and might produce around 60 prints/hour with one employee. M: How much is a manual vs automatic screen printing press? An offset press can run as fast as 100,000 prints per hour. Tom: While 500-800 prints per hour may sound fast and it is the fastest process for decorating apparel, compared to a lot of the commercial printing industry, it is incredibly slow. M: How does it compare to other types of printing? Tom: Other processes, print and cut vinyl, dye sublimation, embroidery, laser transfers, and others are at least an order of magnitude slower than automatic screen printing. M: How does that compare to other customization methods? A $34,000 automatic screen printing press can print 500 prints per hour. The fastest Direct To Garment Printer on the market as of 2018 is the Kornit Vulcan, which does 250 prints per hour – with a machine that costs around $800,000. Tom: An automatic screen printing press is much faster. M: How much faster is that than, let’s say, a DTG machine? Printing at these speeds requires two press operators – one to load shirts and one to unload. It’s not all about the speed of the operator – the faster the machine can advance and stop, the faster it can print for any given speed the operator can load shirts. A reasonable pace to maintain on an auto is 500-800 prints per hour. Tom: Yeah, we can’t keep our printers pulling the equivalent of running 4-minute miles all day. What’s a more typical pace for an average screen printer? In 2010, our founder and CEO, Mike Nemeroff, competed and personally set the record at 1,264 prints per hour. But a previous world record was set by Rush Order Tees. Tom: The current world record for t-shirt printing was set by Luis Omar Viera in 2013 at 2,139 prints per hour. Tom: A manual press operator can print anywhere from 40 to 100 prints an hour, depending on the operator’s speed as well as how many colors are in the design, and whether or not the print requires a flash cure during printing. The automated functions that make a press considered automatic are, one– that platens (that hold the shirts) automatically advance from one station to the next, and two–t he flood bar and squeegee raise, lower, and move automatically. So what makes an automatic press different from a manual? If you’re a new screen printer, thinking of buying an automatic machine, or just curious about the process, this post is for you. In this conversation, we’re going to go over costs, production speed, efficiency, and more. Holy moly, Tom.įor any “thing” involved in custom apparel, Tom’s been involved with it in some way. Within these decorated apparel companies, Tom served roles in finance, marketing, sales, procurement, art, prepress, new equipment investments, multiple production processes, process optimization, shipping, software development, automation, IT, management, human resources, facilities, maintenance, and quality control. He moved on to be the assistant manager at Shadowfax Graphics in 2012, and finally arrived at RushOrderTees in April 2013. With a history in industrial supplies, micro-publishing, and aerospace manufacturing, Tom came to the decorated apparel industry in 2010 managing ClearSky24, a major printing company in Texas. So I’m going to talk to our resident expert, Tom Ingling. For the purpose of this post, we’re comparing the two main types.Īs you would expect, automatic presses print much faster than manual presses. Yes, there are belt printers that do the all-over prints, but they’re pretty rare. Screen printing machines for the decorated apparel market mostly fit into two categories: manual presses and automatic presses.
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