As an embroidery guy, I've always hated screenprinted t-shirts but i'm starting to love 'em!  We had seen a new screenprinting machine at the ISS show in long beach in late january and got pretty darn excited but were still a little sceptical until today.  We figured that the machine was tuned for a trade show and they picked the art they were printing especially for the strengths of the machine but we found out today that the machine is for real.

To give you a little back-story:  Screenprinting has always been a dirty business (especially compared to custom embroidery) because of what's involved in every run.  It's just like you remember from shop class in 7th grade:  you need to seperate the art into distinct colors and burn a screen for each.  (please forgive my crude explanation but again i never really was interested in understanding it).  Then you need to mix the ink to match the color you want and squeegee (sp?) each color onto each shirt.  most of the time (depending on the ink) you must cure the ink before you put another color on to prevent bleeding.  then you need to put the shirt through a dryer for complete curing......AND then clean out the screen with chemicals that you can't just dump down the drain.  As i said earlier, it's really messy and a pain in the butt for any run smaller then 100 units.  Most large (and better) screenprinters run thousands of shirts at a time but that means you need to order 1,000 at a time which is expensive and risky.  NOW, Brother has introduced a printer that will print t-shirts in full color just like an ink jet printer....in seconds!  no screens, no art seperation, no ink mixing, no chemicals and, most important, no set-up for each run.  you can print a custom shirt every time....and just from a regular desktop computer. 

now i'm a huge fan of screenprinting (eventhough as mark pointed out, "it's technically not screenprinting anymore") because the new machines not only let you run small runs but it can be run in an embroidery shop like ours without the BIG MESS it would have created a year ago.