I now have three of the four dark shirts I ordered as part of my experiment, so I thought I would post a preliminary comparison. I just ordered the fourth test shirt from Printfection, and it should arrive within a week.

First a scan of the shirt from Zazzle, and a closeup on the printing.

I feel the job from Zazzle was nicely done. Out of the three shirts Zazzle’s color reproduction was closest to my original image. The white outline is present, but there was also a white outline present on the shirt from Cafepress and a (less noticeable) black outline present on the shirt from Spreadshirt.

Next is the shirt from Cafepress.

The printing from Cafepress is the weakest of the three. The color is not as saturated, and the printing is not as sharp as Zazzle’s. Also, and it may be hard to see this in the photo, when I look closely comparing the two shirts, the color on the Zazzle shirt is much more solid. On the Cafepress shirt the green area is mixed about 50/50 with flecks of yellow, and the blue area mixed 50/50 with white.

Now on to the shirt from Spreadshirt.

Unlike Cafepress & Zazzle where the image is printed directly on the shirt, Spreadshirt uses a different printing process called “Digital Transfer Overlay”. They print the image on a special material, cut around it with some sort of digital cutter and then heat transfer the design onto the shirt. (Assuming the smallest part of your image is at least .06 inches) You can see in the closeup that there is a black outline on parts of the image, but since the shirt is black it is not too noticeable. Though it makes me wonder if I were to order a red shirt, would the outline be black or red? The image I uploaded had a transparent background, so the black was added by Spreadshirt. I’m happy with the way this shirt turned out except for the color reproduction.

I also ordered a sweatshirt from Spreadshirt to try out their flex printing.

This shirt turned out awesome. I ordered the distressed junior hoodie with a blue glitter flex print. The quality is great and there is no hint of an outline around the flex. Flex printing is not suitable for all designs however, because they must be uploaded in vector format and be approved by Spreadshirt.

Once my shirt from Printfection arrives I will post scans of it, and then run the four shirts through the washing machine about five times to see how the designs hold up.

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