This is one of the most accessible Tshirt printing processes for new Tshirt printing businesses. It’s one of the most established processes, people have been doing this for decades – and it’s one of the cheapest Tshirt printing methods available in terms of equipment/machinery setup costs.
Basically, you use a standard inkjet printer, and you inkjet heat transfer paper. You print on the transfer paper, and then heat press it onto the garment.
If you remember the old iron on transfers that you may have seen many years ago, it’s similar to this, only there is better transfer media available these days (better vibrancy, better colour fastness) and you’ll be using proper heat press machinery, not a hand iron.
You can print onto most Tshirts and other garments with injket transfer, so you’re not restricted in garment choice, and you can print a full range of base colours including black.
The difference between inkjet transfer printing on light coloured garments vs on dark coloured garments.
There are two types of injket heat transfer papers, paper for light Tshirts, and paper for dark Tshirts.
For light colored Tshirts & other garments, the injket transfer paper has an opaque base, and for dark garments, the paper has a white base, so you can see the image when it’s transferred onto a black Tshirt, hoodie or sweatshirt.
So when printing onto light Tshirts and other garments, there’s no necessity to cut out any blank areas of background, you can literally just manually cut around the image and then heat press it on to the garment, simple.
But when printing onto dark Tshirts and other garments, as you will be using inkjet heat transfer paper for dark garments, which has a white base, you will have to use a contour cutter to cut out the unwanted bits of white in the background, and then use a weeding knife to remove these bits.
If you don’t do this, it will look like you’ve printed the image onto white paper and then stuck that white paper onto the Tshirt, not a great look.
So this means you’ll need a digital cutter plotter/contour cutter such as the Silhouette Cameo.
You can get a letter sized contour cutter for a couple of hundred dollars and upwards, so they’re not massively expensive, but I’d recommend going for the best that your budget will stretch to. The Silhouette Cameo are a well tried and tested letter sized cutter plotter.
The great thing about this is you’ll also be able to use your optical cutter for vinyl, too, so having a contour cutter also enables you to add another string to your bow, as both vinyl and injet transfer will be pressed with the same heat press.
So for light coloured Tshirts and other garments, you’ll just press the whole letter sized transfer sheet onto the Tshirt, or cut it out of the sheet manually if it’s 2 transfers to a sheet or 4 to a sheet etc.
For dark colored garments, you’ll print the transfer sheet, and then put this through your Silhouette Cameo, or whatever cutter you decide to go with, to cut the white background away, and then you’ll simply weed this out with a weeding tool.
What kind of Tshirt printing businesses use inkjet heat transfer printing?
Inkjet transfer lends itself best to personalized T-shirt printing, and also short run, low volume Tshirt printing in multiples.
If you were focusing on bulk Tshirt printing for trade, you can get much lower production costs with other methods. If you were doing own designs/own brand Tshirt production, again, there are more suitable options.
But for individually printing Tshirts with different designs, or for smaller production runs for clubs and organizations (for instance, printing 10 of the same Tshirt for a bachelor party), inkjet heat transfer printing is a great choice.
Inkjet heat transfer printing also pairs well with Tshirt vinyl, dye sublimation and diamonte, and with all these strings to your bow, this can lead to a fantastic range of products for small garment and giftware printing businesses.
In other words, you’ll need a heat press for inkjet transfer printing, you can use this same heat press for dye sublimation printing, for contour cut vinyl, and for heat pressing diamontes.
You’ll need a contour cutter, for cutting out the white background when using inkjet transfer for dark garments, and you can use the same contour cutter for contour cutting vinyls.
Since all you’ll need then to be able to use vinyl, is the Tshirt vinyl itself (no other equipment required, as you’ll already have the heat transfer press) it makes perfect sense to also use garment vinyls when it would be the best option for the job.
When it comes to adding dye sublimation as a string to your bow, the only additional piece of kit you’ll need is the dye sublimation printer itself – and this process will hugely increase the range of products you can produce, especially if you also get yourself a mug press, as dye sublimation is one of the most popular methods for mug printing for small businesses.