USCutter has recently completed testing on an array of heat transfer papers currently available for sale (or soon will be) on our website.
Paropy papers from Joto and products from Forever can be less expensive, less manual, and more accessible to the beginning user than other methods of custom shirt production including silkscreen, DTG, HTV, and sublimation/Chromablast. And the beautiful part is, all you need to get great results in many cases is just a home laser toner or inkjet printer and a decent quality swing-arm heat press.
Check out this webcast of a webinar recently presented here at USCutter for a detailed overview of all the technology involved, from equipment to media, and some of our findings during testing, including shots of our quality output.
Heat Transfer Papers are the way to go if you want to create great-quality shirts with a minimal upfront investment. If you’re interested in starting out, we’d recommend the following products as being the most accessible for a beginner with the easiest (and most forgiving) learning curve.
Forever Flex-Soft is a 2-paper system that transfers toner from a printed A-sheet directly onto a fabric after a coating has been applied from a B-sheet with heat and pressure. The A-sheet comes in 1 of 10 colors we currently have available, including metallics and neons. Get a 10-pack of sheets (A+B+matte/gloss finishing sheets) for only $24.95, and save about half of what you’d pay for comparable products from Siser or Color Theory.
And unlike HTV, with Flex-Soft you can do very intricate designs with tons of detail, and transfer them immediately with no weeding, just a simple peel!
Perhaps the nicest part about the whole process is that the less expensive the toner printer is, the better the finished product is going to look because consistent thick toner fill on the A-sheet, like that spewed by more wasteful printers, is going to transfer a more solid filled design to the fabric.
Paropy papers from Joto are another easy painless way to transfer full-color images and photos without the need for layering or other manual tasks like cutting and weeding (Note: cutting around an image on CL 135 or 140 is recommended with a scissors to eliminate transfer of the background, and contour cutting is recommended for certain products intended for dark garments).
USCutter has many products compatible with your everyday inkjet printer, CMYK toner printer, or even CMYWT printers like the OKI C711WT with new white toner ink technology for transferring white and light-colored graphics and lettering onto dark garments with results that you couldn’t achieve otherwise without outsourcing your production!
