DTG Shirt Quality

Looks like it wasn't pretreated properly or at all. I don't have a DTG but was looking into buying one. All of the information I read was that the dark shirts need to be pretreated in order for the white ink to properly adhere to the shirt. If you don't pretreat the shirts then the ink will be really light. The shirt examples that I saw looked a lot better than that, I would definitely be asking for a refund.

 

There are a number of factors that go into print quality on DTG. What type of shirt was it? 100% cotton or a 50/50 blend? The pre treat is a factor as well. On the right garment and proper printing that is no where near the quality it should be. We print on a lot of black shirts without any problems. It could be that they are new to this and are not sure what the best way of handling different garments yet.

 

We have a DTG (a horror story in itself); I doubt the pretreat is causing that particular problem although gixxer2004 is right that incorrect pretreat can cause issues with print quality Looks to me that the printer is not getting Cyan or Magenta ink but is getting white and black, which are marginal but probably acceptable if all the colors would have printed. Not enough pretreat usually causes all colors to soak into fabric causing a faded or unclear print. Probably a blocked printhead. I've had similar issues but would NEVER deliver that to a customer. The fact they would probably means you should run away from them as a vendor as fast as you can.

 

a cheaper 100% cotton tee wont print as good as 100% ringspun cotton but they are not getting something right. I would tell them your not accepting that shirt and tell them to run another one or find a new vendor. Here is a shirt we printed on black to show that you can still get good colors on black garments.

 

Used dtg printer for more than 8 years.
A healthy DTG printer can print really well. However, to keep the printer healthy is a huge challenge.

As Reveal1 said, most probably nozzle block on certain channel.
White is very bad too, it could be not enough pretreament or partial nozzle blocked.