The Real Cost of DTF Printing: Mimaki vs. Kongkim vs. Canon PIXMA iP8720

The $1,800 DTF printer we bought in 2022 cost us $7,300 in its first year. The $34,000 Mimaki that replaced it works out to about $31 per day when amortized over 36 months. If you're comparing printers by sticker price, you're making the same mistake we did.

I'm the procurement manager at a 12-person custom apparel company, managing a $180,000 annual production budget. Over the past 6 years, I've tracked every invoice, compared quotes from 8 different printer vendors, and built a total cost of ownership (TCO) spreadsheet that I still update quarterly. Here's what the data taught me about DTF printers—and why you should stop reading spec sheets and start doing the real math.

The DTF Printer Process Is Simple. The Waste Isn't.

DTF stands for direct-to-film. The process has four steps: print your design in reverse onto a PET film using pigment inks—including white ink, which is essential for dark garments—then apply adhesive powder to the wet ink, cure the powder with heat, and press the film onto the fabric. The film peels away, leaving the design bonded to the garment.

Sounds easy. And it can be, once you've dialed in every variable. But here's where the money actually goes, and none of it shows up on the spec sheet:

• Film. Cheap PET film jams, warps, and misregisters. We burned through three brands before finding one that ran reliably.
• Adhesive powder. Too little and the print rejects. Too much and you're wasting material. Both ways cost money.
• White ink. The most expensive component in DTF. It clogs, separates, and needs purging. Every cleaning cycle is cash dumped into a waste bottle.
• Rejected prints. Every print that fails at the press costs you film, ink, powder, and labor—and you don't find out until the last step.

Everything I'd read about DTF said it was practically foolproof. In practice, the process is straightforward—the waste management isn't. And waste is where the real cost lives.

Our Kongkim DTF Printer Experience

I want to be fair before I go further. Our first DTF setup was a Kongkim unit, which sits in the budget tier of the market. It wasn't a bad machine for the $1,800 price tag. It got us into DTF without a huge upfront gamble.

But when I audited our 2023 spending, the data was uncomfortable. Color matching drifted between runs—industry standard for brand-critical colors is Delta E < 2 per Pantone guidelines, and we were seeing 4-5 by mid-run, visible to anyone, not just trained observers. Printhead clogs cost us 3 full production days. Support responses took up to 24 hours. And our rejected print rate hit 22% in the worst month.

The Kongkim unit itself wasn't the entire problem; our setup process was also underdeveloped. But the equipment's limitations made it impossible to fix everything through workflow changes alone. We replaced the Kongkim after 14 months.

Does that mean Kongkim is a bad brand? No—I've only worked with their entry-level model, and I can't speak to their full lineup. What I can tell you is what the entry-level experience did to our budget: a $1,800 printer became $7,300 when we tracked film, ink, powder, service, and reprints.

The Canon PIXMA iP8720 Question

One of the most common searches that lands on our site is 'canon pixma ip8720 inkjet printer reviews'—usually from someone hoping they can use one for DTF. I get the appeal. It's a capable A3+ photo printer for around $350, and the 9600 x 2400 dpi output on paper is genuinely impressive. Standard commercial print minimums sit around 300 DPI at final size, so it's got resolution to burn.

But here's the thing: DPI isn't the bottleneck in DTF. The real issue is ink chemistry. DTF requires pigment inks—especially white ink, because it's the base layer on dark fabrics. The iP8720 uses dye-based photo inks plus a chroma optimizer clear coat. No white channel. No bulk ink system. And the printhead isn't designed for the higher-viscosity inks that DTF formulations use.

Could you modify an iP8720 to make it work? People do. But modifications void the warranty, and per-print costs balloon when you factor in rejected transfers, wasted media, and time spent babysitting a machine designed for a different job. Never expected the $350 option to be the most expensive path we tested—on a cost-per-usable-print basis, it came in roughly 4x higher than the Mimaki.

That said, the iP8720 has a legitimate place in an apparel shop: proofing and client mockups. For showing a color concept before committing to a production run, it's hard to beat at that price. It's just not a production DTF machine.

Cost Per Usable Print: The Metric That Changed Everything

After getting burned on hidden fees twice, I built a cost calculator. Now it's the first tool I open for any equipment evaluation.

Here's the formula:

1. Take the full purchase price and amortize it over 36 months.
2. Add annual service costs: printhead replacements, maintenance, cleaning supplies.
3. Add consumables: film, adhesive powder, ink—tracked monthly.
4. Divide everything by the number of sellable prints that made it onto a garment and shipped.

When we ran this for our shop, the results were surprising. The Kongkim setup gave us a cost per usable print of $2.84. The Mimaki TxF150-75—which cost about 18x more upfront—gave us $1.61 per usable print. That's a 43% difference in the right direction, despite the dramatically higher sticker price.

Why? Because the rejection rate dropped to under 4%, color consistency eliminated reprints, and we stopped losing production days to clogged printheads. The machine is faster too, which means more capacity and shorter lead times. Those aren't soft benefits—they're line items in the tracking system.

I should add that our numbers are based on roughly 200 production orders averaging 25-100 pieces. If you're producing simpler work or higher volumes, your figures will shift.

Mimaki Printer News Worth Watching

I don't follow every product release from Mimaki, but I track them because their announcements affect my budget. A few things have stood out:

Mimaki's textile printer lineup continues to expand. On the DTF side, they now offer the TxF150-75 for smaller operations and the TxF300-75 for higher-volume production. Both use the DTF process with dedicated white ink handling and inline curing. On the broader textile printer front, the TS330-3200 targets high-speed dye-sublimation on polyester. And the company has been investing heavily in software—automated color calibration and remote monitoring—which directly attack the two biggest ongoing costs in textile printing: color drift and downtime.

One caveat: this was accurate as of early 2025. The printing equipment market moves fast, so verify current models, pricing, and software updates before you build a budget around them.

When You Shouldn't Buy Any DTF Printer

Let me be direct: if you're printing fewer than 50 garments per week, don't buy a DTF printer. Not a Mimaki, not a Kongkim, not anything. Use a service provider. Your equipment cost per print will be higher than a service's per-print price, and you'll absorb all the maintenance and training costs on top.

Also make sure DTF is the right process at all. DTF excels on cotton and cotton blends, especially for full-color designs on dark fabrics. If you're printing on polyester, dye-sublimation often wins on cost. If your products are simple one-color designs on light shirts, screen printing might still be the cheapest path. The best question isn't 'which printer?'—it's 'which process gives me the lowest cost per sellable item?'

My experience is specific to custom apparel runs of 25-100 pieces. If you're running thousands of pieces a week, your numbers will shift—and the case for investing in higher-tier equipment usually gets stronger.

What I Still Regret

I still kick myself for declining the $600 on-site training the vendor offered when we bought our first DTF setup. I figured we could figure it out. We did—eventually. But the months of wasted film, rejected prints, and lost production time cost us far more than that $600 would have.

That's the lesson I come back to every time I look at a printer quote: the cheapest purchase price is rarely the cheapest total cost, and prevention is almost always cheaper than correction. Five minutes of verification beats five days of fixing. In DTF printing, that means getting training, dialing in your process, and tracking your real costs before you scale up. Do the math first. The printer you pick afterward will be the right one.