Screen Printing

How much does it cost? The short answer is, it depends, but below we have some ballpark pricing info.

Ok, so give me an example For a single color single placement print on a white tee shirt in a quantity of 36 we woudld charge $5.50 per shirt plus any applicable setup or art charges. Below you can see the factors involved in that number.

How does the number of colors matter? For each color in a traditional screen printed design we must print a "film" and "burn" a screen. Multiple colors must be "registered" with relation to one another. Each shirt must have ink applied once for each color. Then each of the burned screens must be "reclaimed". Each additional color tends to add $.50-$1.50 to the per shirt price and may result in additional setup charges.

How does the number of placements affect the price? An additional placement(a second printing location) requires an additional screen. An additional placement of the shirt onto the press, and an additonal printing, and an additional curing of the shirt. Additional placements cost slightly more than additional colors on the first placement. For a second one color placement on the same shirt the price would run about $1- 1.50

How does the shirt type and color affect the price? Shirt type is pretty obvious. The nicer the shirt the more expensive. Color affects the price because suprisingly dark shirts cost more than light shirts. Also an additional step (called flashing) is required when printing light colors on darks. If we just print red ink on black it will look faded and not bright. What we do is print a white "underbase" which will make the red look red. But this underbase must be partially dried or "flashed" to permit the red to print on top. This step drops the production capacity, thus increasing the price. Usually a black tee costs about $1 more than a white tee. Flashing adds $.25 to the price if it doesn't also add an aditional color (i.e. if white is already part of the design.

What are these setup charges you've mentioned? There are several items that fall into the category of "setup" charges. The first is art preparation. If the art requires rework on our part we may have to charge for that, if it requires significant time. The screen setup charge helps defray the time and cost associated with getting ready to print. The materials involved in setting up a job are emulsion, tape, computer transparencies. The labor involved is in coating the screen, exposing the screen to the films, washing out the image and putting it on press. Multi color designs require more than one screen to be processed and then the two screens aligned on the press or "registered". Setup also defrays the cost of cleaning up the screens at the end of the job so they can be reused. In all it takes about an hour per color to set up a job, so a $15 per screen is really minimal. On large orders we sometimes waive that charge. Usually we will waive the cost of one screen for every 36 pieces you order.

Any other "hidden" charges? Hey, they aren't hidden, I'm telling you about them right now. There is a color change charge if you are printing the same image in multiple colors. (Like if you want it printed in royal on green shirts and green on royal shirts). There is a $5 charge to clean the old color out and put a new color on press. Also, some inks cost extra. Reflective inks, puff inks, nylon inks all require special treatment or cost extra, so they are a bit more expensive.

So I'm not going to get hit with a big unexpected charge when I pick up my stuff am I? No way. We quote everything up front and we honor our quotes. If you don't see a charge on the quote it probably means we rolled the cost into the per item price. We often do this with the specialty inks, flash charges etc. Also, we sometimes roll the setup charges into the per item price for teams that are collecting money from their players so that they don't have to explain all of the setup charges to everyone.

Speaking of tems, you don't go through this whole setup process for every single player number, what do you do for those? We can do a few different things. Most often we use screen printed transfers. In this process the digits are screen printed on to a special paper in reverse. We then use a heat press to apply the numbers. They look and feel identical to screen printed numbers because it is the same ink, just applied differently. Alternately we use a special type of vinyl sheet that we laser cut letters into. When heat applied it is very similar to screen printing. The advantage of vinyl is we can do it in very short runs, or with custom fonts.

What are your artwork requirements?Vector. If you can supply vector art you are virtually guaranteed that we won't have to charge you an art charge (unless it is really unusual for some reason). Vector art can be identified by some common file extensions (.cdr, .eps, .ai). The opposite of vector is raster or bitmap, identified by the file extensions, .jpg, .tif, .bmp, .gif. In some instances the raster art can be converted, or if it is single color and the raster art is high resolution we can sometimes use it as-is. PHotoshop documents (.psd) are sometimes raster and sometimes vector. We have to look at it to know. Art charges are $25 per hour. We seldom need more than an hour and usually less.

How many colors can you print? We have a four color press. For more colors we either do digital printing, or we use a subcontractor with whom we have experience. It is often difficult to determine the number of colors just by looking at the image. Some shades of color can be reproduced using halftones, which don't necessarily count as an additional color

What's a halftone? Halftones are dots. A dense number of dots will produce a darker shade of a color than a less dense number of dots. Halftones are what newspaper pictures were printed with up until the last 10 years or so. By varying the density and size of the dots we can produce shades or even color gradations using a single color of ink.

You said you can use the digital print, lets just go with that for my full color design? Whoa there....it isn't as easy as that. Digital printing is a promising technology, but it is in its infancy. Digitial printing is using what is a lot like an inkjet printer to print ink directly onto a shirt. We can do full color and very short runs with no setup charges. However, it isn't for every job. There are limitations. The ink is wildly expensive, so the shirts cost more (about $12 for a white shirt with a full color design). The machine is also painfully slow, so it is unacceptable for large runs. Unlike traditional screen printing the price is in the materials, not the labor, so there is no big price break for volume.

You mention printing digital to a white shirt, what about a black shirt? I was hoping you wouldn't ask. We can digitally print black and other dark colors, but there are multiple steps involved and white ink is more wildly expensive than the other colors, so a single shirt costs about $18. The dark process is even slower than the white process, so for more than about 12 shirts this just isn't a viable option.

Polar bears aren't really white are they? Nope. A polar bears skin is actually black. And their fur is nearly transparent with an off white sheen to it, not really white. The light makes it appear that way. Check out our links page for more on Polar Bears, and the NRDC, which is attempting to help save the polar bear's habitat.

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