There are a lot of differences between a manual and an automatic press, but we are going to hit some of the major differences today.

The main difference is in the speed of the printing. With a manuel press you have to pull every color by hand which becomes very time consuming on a multiple color job. So lets take a 3 color logo for an example. On a 3 color logo you would have to pull every color before one shirt is complete. On an automatic you can set up all 3 colors and set your index time to 11-14 seconds depending on the design and every time your machine indexes you have a completed custom screenprinted t-shirt. On average you can print 300 shirts per hour no matter how many colors are in your logo, on a manual press if you have 6 color logo you could lower you output to 25 per hour.

Another big difference is in the quality of the print. One of the concerns my customers have is in the thickness of the print. With manual printing the pressure is controlled by the printer. Most of the time the printing is a lot thicker on manual printing because the printer is allowing too much ink to pass thru the screen. With automatic printing you adjust the pressure with a guage which makes the print much thinner and makes the shirt easier to wear.

We will discuss other differences later, but these are the main 2 reasons automatic presses are much better to have for custom screenprinting.

Labels: automatic screenprinting, custom screenprinting, manual printing