Cheap DTG Printer | The Best Direct to Garment alternative | Laser Heat Transfer Printer Heat Press

what's going on print fam an amazing package showed up for yours truly today let's get to unboxing this thing and check it out i'm gonna cut it now as i'm unboxing this thing you may be asking yourself cam what in the ever loving crap is that what i have right here beside me and you can barely see it in frame is a heat transfer laser printer the incredible union at i color 550 can apply images to t-shirts in less than three minutes does your shop need to produce color jobs quickly and efficiently the icolor 550s got you covered check out that handsome son of a gun right there killing it and like i said all this can be done in less than three minutes learn how now in the youtube videos of the past i've gotten comment after comment of you guys asking about heat transfers and the different opportunities and the different options and how you can go about making them so i did a bunch of research and after quite a bit of digging around i found basically two companies that are offering this technology at a reasonable price and there there appeared to be a very clear winner so i harassed and harassed and emailed and called this company and just begging them to send a unit over to me so that i could demo it in service to all of you beautiful print fam members and uninet finally agreed to send me the icolor 550. this one is cool because it's compact which means for a technology like this it's pretty much the most affordable direct to garment option that i have found so far excuse me did you guys punch the thumbs up yet do me a favor punch that thumbs up right now this video growing it helps the channel grow so thank you so much let's get back to it this is not the final place for this i simply want to get it in and set up and start playing remove the orange tape from pretty much everything yank that off i'm not clear about how any of this stuff works and unit like there's they basically offer a full training course but right now i just won't mess around with it i just want to see what's up the setup on this thing is super easy you plug in the usb and the power cord to the printer and then to the computer and power it up and then you just set the toner cartridges i had to set the white toner cartridge here it is straightforward and i'm going to go to step four install the unit eye color printer driver insert the usb flash drive this is just the dongle here you sit that in the flash drive that needs to be in there at all times and then you set up the drivers in the software super fast it's almost done there we go easy peasy all right admittedly it has been a little while since i actually unboxed this thing so it's it's like there's going to be some continuity issues but assuming that's the way this is going to work okay first things first let's talk about how the system works you print your image out on the transfer media it's basically a transparent sheet with a coating on it once it's been printed out you take your adhesive media and you're going to apply it to the transfer media peel the adhesive media off the transfer it's self-weeding which i'll show you what that means in a minute and then you take this media and you press it on the t-shirt that's basically it the process of importing an image is as simple as this you open your rip come up here to the plus icon and then you can scale it to fit within the medius this thing has a really cool feature called knock me out black i'm going to pull quite a bit of black out of this thing so this is showing it and transparent and then you can preview it on the shirt itself transparent shirt color i've knocked out the black so i'm gonna hit okay i kid you not it's that simple for most graphics for most of the things in the situation that's all you got to do print job you do not want to load it in the manual feed slot always in trade number one and you want the the media to go in coated side up close that voila so it prints the color all of the necessary colors facing frontwards and then it does another pass and it lays the white toner on top dude it's crazy but it's in reverse so we're going to apply adhesive backing and then it's going to print this way let's do the next step i'll show you you're going to have the press set at 310 degrees and the first thing you want to do is preheat your the platen or the pallet whatever you call that so you're just going to get that thing up to 10th now i'm going to lay the transparency coated side facing up next i'm going to tape take my adhesive sheet and i'm going to fold one of these corners over like so and i'm going to place it right on top just like that next thing i'm going to do is play my teflon sheet or whatever this is called i don't know all the nomenclature for this industry i'm not much of a heat press guy but i'm learning but you lay that over the top one tip that i heard from a guy that's been using these forever is that if you're using one of the crappier clamshell models they don't apply even pressure so you're gonna press this thing for a hundred and twenty seconds but you're gonna do 60 one way let it pop turn it the other way and then press it for another 60. so that's what we're going to do i would say it's at medium pressure at best it actually feels quite light i'm not having to do a lot of downward force with it and a little spin ah it's hot it's very hot and we're gonna go for another 60. now immediately when the clam shell pops you want to start pulling and the idea is to do one smooth unstopping motion if you stop in the motion it's going to get screwed up so i'm going to go quickly so i remove the teflon immediately and keeping the thing on the hot pallet you're going to grab your corner and you're trying to get this in one smooth motion so i'm holding it off the edge and i'm trying to do the pull without stopping without getting stuck any of that stuff boom i did in fact get that pull correct but i'd say i went through 20 of these sheets before i've kind of figured out the trick to it but the ultimately the goal is as soon as it comes off the pallet you're grabbing the corner and you want to pull in one smooth motion if you're pulling and then halfway it sticks and then you have to pull the rest of the way you're going to see a line through the thing so i would say the skill of laser heat transfers is in the pool another important step with these is to trim the edges and the reason for this is that there can be some residual glue from going through quickly it doesn't have to be perfect you know this thing is self-weeding amazing i honestly can't believe that it works when they told me that it works this way i was like okay whatever bro sure sure it does but it does all right now that we've trimmed it it's time to apply it to the t-shirt let's get what do i got let's grab a gildan 5000 the the st they have different paper qualities the standard paper works great on cotton and you can make it work on polyester by lowering the temperatures but they do have a premium paper which is designed to have no bleeding on a polyester garment so they've covered all the bases dude i babble when i get excited about stuff i babble you guys know how it goes let's keep it rolling god head bouncing all over the place i'm just like a freaking tweaker dude if you can thread the shirt on the platen you should this is too small i can't it's just not going to happen with this what i get from them is this is not the right press if you're going to be doing a lot of these you want to get one where you can thread the shirt on and you also don't want the clamshell you want like the swing away style press i have to do it in a less than ideal way so now to apply it to the t-shirt we're setting the coated side down or the glue side down and the colorful side up and we're going to press this thing for 30 seconds and i'm just using medium pressure i think i let that run for 60 seconds oh well once it's pressed you got to set it aside and let it cool this is a very important step they say that you need to let these shirts cool completely how much time that takes is determined by a lot of factors it cools down in like about 30 seconds to a minute they they're advising you to let it cool for five minutes it's not really necessary but i feel like they have to give you the maximum you know to prevent errors because even i when i first started this thing i was kind of being so the trick is apparently you want to start at a corner that has the most density in the image so a very dead spot because you need to break the film from the image so what we're going to do is roll this and i'm trying to roll it and just break it from the image and it rolls off so easy and voila now there is one more quick step that you got to do for another 30 seconds it's a little glossy right now and honestly i like the gloss but you still need to do a treatment to make sure that you fully adhere the image to the shirt they also have another media if you like that glossy look you can get another media that has gloss they also have a bunch of other medias like glitters and just so much stuff it's gonna trip you out but before i move on to the next step i want to intervene and talk about why i'm so excited about this i have been considering getting a direct-to-garment printer for forever there's so much to it and i hear story after story about how if you're not using it every day if you don't have a constant flow of work that they're always clogging and they're just a huge maintenance burden this thing is cool because it uses toners the ink never dries up now this is the smallest one but they also have another one that will do 11 by 17 inch sheets however they have a very cool feature in the rip and this feature ships with it as well where you can split it it does this crazy beep bop boop thing and it dissects your image and it figures out where it can cut it so that it makes it easy to tile it into multiple sheets but it creates um a fitment thing so you can make pretty much images as big as you want by running it through this software and i'm going to go over that whole thing in another video there's so much to talk about i feel kind of like a kid with add right now there's so much to say all of the cool things this thing can do final step you got to do one more pass with the heat press you're going to lay your teflon sheet on top of it pass is doing is adhering the adhesive to the shirt permanently so i did the final heat press i'm gonna peel this off smooth one motion and just have a look at that multi-color self-weeding you can see even these fine half tone dots there's no white poking out from underneath uh the colors are super bright and vibrant the feel is incredible i mean what dude what more can i say it's freaking amazing now the thing also ships with a bunch of features that i wasn't aware of but i feel like the united eye color 550 is a standout from its competitors because of these reasons and i wrote them down uh just because there's so much the first things first included in the box is the pro rip software so that ships with its standard the competitors you gotta pay for it separately number two there's an included black toner so as far as i my understanding all the other competitors in the in the laser heat transfer industry they don't even offer this configuration which i believe really make it a standout it also comes with a white fluorescent toner you know for printing your your heat transfers and all that stuff that's all included with it number four and this is a big seller specifically with the eye color 550 does over printing and this is a very standard thing with the heat transfer toner specific laser printers but this one can also do under printing and this is cool because it allows you to do things like dark colored papers transparent papers window clings greeting cards any of that kind of stuff that still needs an underbase to have a bright vibrant print you can do that with the same printer and i just want to be clear drive this home all heat transfer laser printers can do the over printing but only the icolor 550 can do under printing in addition to the over printing and it's very cool because you can move the cartridges around that's crazy uh what else we got here this is another cool thing man so you also have the ability to upgrade to fluorescent toners so not only is the white toner already fluorescent but you can upgrade upgrade to fluorescence for the remaining three colors in the system you can also upgrade to a clear toner now i'm not sure it says that this is for full color glitter prints or for clear spot colors on dark papers and stuff like that but it's cool that it just gives you so much flexibility in the kind of effects that you can print so that is again very specific to this printer you also and this is crazy you can upgrade to sublimation toner using plain copy paper so essentially you can also be in the sublimation business with the same printer and you know you can these cartridges can just be switched out so you can do some uh over printing for heat transfers and then you can just switch the cartridges out to the sublimation cartridges for printing on mugs and mouse pads and all that kind of stuff it's crazy i mean i'm doing multi-colored jobs in like less than three minutes and that's that's pretty freaking amazing now imagine this imagine you have one of those printers which is all you need but you have two or four heat presses going at once you would be cranking through shirts fast man you could scale up from one printer just by adding more presses to the mix so this was knocked out this is that little dog the dog that we did earlier but this was also the black was knocked out so it only printed the color and the white areas so this is cool let me show you something else i was doing i mean if you see the the purple here those are all knocked out so it's not printing on that which keeps the hand really really soft i made a bunch of these little things and then you have two options of the way you want to do this i made these so that you could do them on like any color including a light colored garment so i kept the black in it but you can easily knock the black areas out of this too if you're putting it on a dark colored shirt you could easily through the rip knock the black out so the flexibility on this thing is just it's absolutely mind-boggling i love it i feel like it's an absolute monster for small to medium-sized shops that are wanting to get into direct to garment but are not ready for the tremendous nightmare that is associated with direct with direct-to-garment printing i think that this is the solution and even if you're a larger shop let's just say you're doing 30 jobs a month and they're low quantity and maybe you're just using it as a supplement for some of your best clients that every once in a while they ask if they can get one or two shirts made this is a great supplement even for a large shop the only thing where i think it would have its limitations although i'm not sure yet let me wrap this up this is the best direct-to-garment solution until you need to go up to that corny 300 000 direct to garment machine everything else in between they're kind of like i don't know maybe they're like they're like toys a little bit this is a legitimate piece of equipment it will produce low quantity orders quickly efficiently and because the rip is so intuitive there's not a lot of hassle when it comes to stepping and prepping the art that's my my kind of final verdict right now i can't wait to do a few more videos and if you guys have any questions about the printer uh price whatever hit me up in the comments unite would be happy to dive in and give you any information you want the printer is not very expensive but i didn't get clearance to tell you exactly how much it is so i'm going to let you internet do that in the comments of this video so just pop in there and ask him and uh 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Channel: The Print Life

Views: 635,566

Rating: 4.8966117 out of 5

Keywords: Cheap Dtg Printer, dtg, dtg machine, dtg price, dtg pricing, dtg printing, dtg printing machine, dtg vs screen printing, direct to garment printer, direct to garment printer cheap, business, custom t shirt business, digital garment printing, direct to garment, Direct to Garment alternative, direct to garment printing, t shirt printing, t shirt printing at home, t-shirt printing, tshirt, heat press, laser heat transfer printer, laser heat transfer, laser heat transfer paper

Id: FzB3XrzFE4w

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020