Screen Printing is no longer "silk screening". The concept of screen printing is very simplistic but in the last ten years has become a very technical process. A simplistic definition of screen printing would be using a squeegee to force ink through a stencil created on a mesh fabric onto some type of substrate such as a t-shirt. A lack of knowledge and low cost equipment usually means poor quality printing and it is these cases which result in the customer saying "I bought screen printed t-shirts and the ink washed out; they just don't last." The truth is that a properly printed garment should have the print outlast the garment.

Quality screen printing equipment is expensive! Expensive equipment does not mean expensive printing costs to the customer it usually means less cost. The better the equipment, the better printing capability the printer has at his disposal and the higher production rate means a lower price because of higher production rate of printed garments The primary piece of equipment in screen printing is the press. Presses come in either manual or automatic style. The manual press is completely operated by man power and the automatic is mechanized. The automatic press will always win hands down in terms of efficiency and consistency in the quality of the print and has a much higher production rate resulting in lower cost t-shirts and apparel to the customer. There is a lot of work that goes into setting up a job to be printed. The artwork prepared, color separations made, the screen must be made, set-up into the press, registered to print correctly, squeegees and floodbars adjusted, the ink loaded and a test print done. The time required to print 24 shirts is just a few minutes on an automatic press and possibly a half hour on a manual press. The setup time may have been several hours. This time is usually averaged out among the number of pieces ordered. Therefore, the more garments printed the lower the cost per unit.

Screens, artwork quality, emulsion quality, exposure light source quality, technique and knowledge all affect the quality of the final print. Each color printed at each location on the garment requires a separate screen. Dark shirts usually must be "underbased" with white ink as the first color and may require more screens than a white or light colored shirt. In other words, it costs less to print white shirts than dark shirts. If you were to print red ink on a white shirt the ink would look red. If you print red ink on a black shirt it looks maroon colored. In order to be bright red on a black shirt, the red ink must have white ink printed under it first. This is called printing an underbase. Printing an underbase adds to the cost of the shirt. Not only does it cost more to print dark colored shirts but because of the cost in dying fabrics, the darker the shirt, the more expensive it is.

Many printers think that ink is just ink. Wrong! Printers all over the country are using quality inks and charge the same rates as printers not using quality inks. It is a matter of making a choice to do things the right way or half way. Obviously, if you have gone to the trouble to read this far into this article you believe things should be done the right way. Ink manufacturers produce certain stock colors of screen printing ink. Unless you specify a PMS color # when ordering, most screen printers will use the stock ink that most closely matches the colors in your design. Custom ink colors can be mixed to match any shade in the PMS color set. Most printers charge for matching a PMS color since this is an added expense to the printer. One of the worst things you can do as a client is to send a screen printer artwork via e-mail or computer disk and expect the printer to match the ink to a computer file. The computer file may display colors on your monitor one way and look completely different on another computer. The screen printer can most likely match the ink to what he sees on his computer but do not expect it to match what is on your computer. If you must have an exact shade or color match you should specify the PMS color number when ordering. If you do not know the PMS color number you should be able to go to any graphic artist and get them to assist you in matching the color you want to a PMS color number.