What Screen Printing Is Genuinely Better At

Last Updated: Thursday 10th September 2026 By Ben Gellbert

Cost at volume is the obvious advantage. The others tend to matter more once you've lived with both methods for a year.

It lasts longer. A properly cured plastisol print survives roughly 60 to 80 washes before it starts to crack, whereas DTG runs closer to 40 to 60 and fades visibly on the way there. At 50 washes, a screen print still holds around 85 to 90% of its original colour strength, against 65 to 75% for DTG. If you run a venue washing staff shirts twice a week, or a crew putting work shirts through an industrial machine every day, that difference decides the whole thing.

Both methods do fail eventually, and they fail differently. DTG fades because the ink sits down inside the fibre, which we have written about separately in how long DTG printed T-shirts last in the wash. Screen prints crack instead, and they crack when they have been under-cured, hot-washed or tumble-dried on high. Cold wash, inside out, hang dry, and the print will outlast the shirt.

The ink range is also wider, and this one is easy to underrate. Digital methods print colour. Screen printing prints materials: metallics, shimmers, puff inks that rise up off the fabric, discharge inks that strip the garment dye so the design sits in the fabric instead of on top of it. None of that exists in a digital process.

Then there is colour matching across reorders. We keep your Pantone references and screen specifications on file, so batch three comes back the same colour as batch one. For anyone ordering staff uniforms on a rolling basis, that's the difference between a uniform and a pile of shirts that are nearly the same.

And solid colour actually looks solid. A block of flat colour laid down through a screen has a density on a dark garment that digital printing still has not caught up to.

When We Will Tell You to Use Something Else

Under 25 shirts. Digital transfers or DTG. The setup will never pay for itself.

• Photographic artwork or complex gradients. Simulated process and CMYK screen printing both handle this well, but the separation work needs volume behind it. Under 75 shirts, print it digitally.
• Every shirt different. Individual names or numbers cannot be screen printed economically, because each variation is another screen.
• You need it this week. Screens have to be made before anything prints. A digital method skips that step entirely.
• Polos, caps, jackets, anything corporate and structured. Embroidery usually looks better and wears better than a print on those garments.

We would rather send you to the right method than take an order that disappoints you. If you are not sure which side of the line you are on, call and describe the job.