When it comes to direct-to-garment (DTG) printers, and you don’t even have a budget for commercial printers, the IEHK A3 XP600 printer makes sense for small businesses.
It is relatively portable with its 30 × 25 × 20 inches size and about 95 pounds weight, though with this, it requires a dedicated and stable workspace.
It can handle both direct-to-garment (DTG) printing and direct-to-film (DTF), and it’s built around Epson’s XP600 printhead.
Having these two printing methods in one compact machine makes it better than a basic entry-level T-shirt printer.
The A3 Printing Format
Standard T-shirt printers have shirt boards or pallets that are 11.6 × 16.5 inches (295 × 420 mm) in dimensions, while IEHK A3 XP600 pallets are 13 × 19.7 inches (329 × 500 mm) in size.
This makes it easy to print on adult shirts front and back, and do large designs.
It also supports interchangeable pallets: an adult shirt pallet, a baby cloth pallet and a narrower pallet for sleeves and jean legs.
For a small business in shirt printing, it saves costs and offers flexibility in custom apparel printing so you’re not limited to only T-shirts.
IEHK A3 XP600 object height is 5.9 in(150 mm) maximum, and 2,880 × 1,440 dpi. maximum.
XP600 has good print speed
Epson EcoTank L805 for example has a higher resolution than XP600, which is about 5760 x 1440 dpi, but I prefer the A3 XP600 printer because of its print speed.
XP600 A3 colour print is usually 3 minutes, while L805 is 4 minutes, but both are very good.
Print speed matters for a small business owner who needs to process orders and deliver fast to clients.
Those 1 to 2 minutes you save from one shirt can increase your efficiency when you have large orders, better than a higher resolution that clients may not be able to differentiate as much in finished works.
Also, finished work is not determined by resolution only, but also by coverage, pass count, and RIP settings.
The two printing methods: DTG and DTF
This printer is designed as a DTG/DTF hybrid.
For DTG, you place the cloth on the board and receive water-based textile ink directly.
For DTF, it prints onto film using its embedded vacuum tray, without using the shirt board.
DTG is particularly suitable for cotton and natural-fabric apparel, while DTF expands the range to materials where conventional DTG is less suitable.
The only problem with having these two methods in one machine is that switching between DTG and DTF would have you changing and flushing the ink lines.
It’s not what you can easily switch, and doing so comes with stress, maintenance and costs: cleaning fluid and ink.
It supports White Ink
IEHK XP600 has a six-channel configuration which supports CMYK plus white ink. Its automatic white-ink circulation system keeps pigment suspended and reduces clogging.
It has also automated cleaning and height detection so you don’t go through the white ink maintenance stress.
However, users can still experience nozzle and white-ink problems such as having the white nozzles drop out during production, but in rare cases.
Setup requirements
The printing machine runs through USB on Windows 10 or higher and comes with RIP software, a driver and a manual.
It has 110/220V, 50–60Hz, 250W electrical requirements, and should be operated in a room with a temperature of 10-28°C, and 20-80% relative humidity.
It requires pretreatment and curing at around 340°F for two to three minutes to establish wash durability.
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