Most people ordering a printed shirt do not know or care which process is used, and they are right not to — what matters is how it looks and how long it lasts. But the three common methods have genuinely different strengths, and knowing roughly which suits your job makes the conversation quicker.
Direct-to-film
DTF prints the design onto a special film, which is then heat-pressed onto the garment. Its advantages are full colour with no extra cost per colour, no minimum order, and it works on cotton, polyester and blends alike. A photograph or a design with a dozen colours costs the same to press as a single-colour logo, which is why one-offs and small runs usually end up here.
Heat-transfer vinyl
Vinyl is cut from coloured sheet and weeded by hand, then pressed. It gives very solid, crisp colour and is extremely durable, which is why it dominates sports numbering and names. The catch is that every colour is a separate layer of material, so detailed or photographic artwork is impractical, and a large solid design can feel heavy on the fabric.
Screen printing
Screen printing pushes ink through a mesh stencil, one screen per colour. Setting up those screens takes real time, so it rarely makes sense for a handful of shirts — but once they exist, printing is fast and the cost per shirt falls sharply. For a few hundred shirts in one or two colours, nothing beats it on price or on hand feel.
The rough rule
Small numbers or lots of colours point to DTF. Names and numbers point to vinyl. Large runs in few colours point to screen print. Plenty of jobs sit near a boundary, and the honest answer is sometimes that two methods would both be fine.