Sublimation printing

Pros:

Very cheap and accessible. Most of the time you can simply refill an old printer with sublimation inks and you are ready to go. You can even get away with printing on regular office paper instead of using expensive sublimation sheets.

Requires minimal maintenance. Sublimation ink does not to clog up easily.

Works on a variety of products such as mugs, keyrings, coasters etc.

On industrials scale, a variety of all over print cut and sew products can be manufactured using large format printers.

Cons:

You are limited to polyester garments. Cotton sublimation is possible with use of additional sublimation sprays and transfer powders, which can be a complex process.

You are limited to light coloured products. You can’t sublimate onto black shirts.

DTG Printing

Pros:

DTG printed shirts have possibly the best feel to them. You can't beat the softness, quality and washability of a well printed DTF shirt.

You can print on print on pretty much anything you can fit on your flatbed. Rough surface tote bag? No problem! A shoe? Easy!

Cons:

Very expensive to get into. You can buy a cheap Chinese flatbed printer for £2000 but those are nothing compared to a proper £13,000 machine or an industrial printer. Consumables are expensive, maintenance is expensive, spares are expensive. You can go on YouTube and search for “Why I sold my DTG printer” or “Why my t-shirt business failed” and you will realize that DTG is simply not financially viable for a starting business.

You will need to pretreat your t-shirts. This process can be more tricky than it seems. Ideally you would buy a pretreatment machine and a decent dryer, costing you even more money.

White DTG ink is famous for its clogging and daily maintenance requirement. Every time you leave your printer idle for a few days you risk ruining a £1800 printhead.

Screen Printing

Pros:

Best way to mass produce t-shirts on a budget.

Master screen printers can produce amazing results.

Cons:

Not for one off orders. It takes a long time to set everything up for each design. But once everything is running you can quickly print a large quantity of shirts.

Screen printing is an art form. It has a steep learning curve and will require a lot of practice to do right.

Requires more space

It’s one of the messier printing methods that involves spraying, washing, ink mixing, chemicals etc.