
At Printing United last year I visited the Aeoon Technologies booth, where I met Austin Thom who runs a business in Oregon printing digital images on T shirts with one of these machines. I was dazzled by the quality of the shirts the company was showing. Even those – especially those – that had been washed a number of times still showed brilliant color and did not seem to have lost their brilliance to the laundry.

Aeoon makes five machines for printing on T shirts and other garments. The machines vary mostly in throughput. Some have two pallets for printing while one has three. The quality and features are otherwise similar. One of their machines is a hybrid that combines a traditional screen-printing system with an ink-jet printer in one unit.
All are CMYK ink-jet printers with the ability to print a white under-print (either solid or tonal). This allows printing on non-white fabrics with extraordinary quality.
The resolution of the printers ranges from 600 and up to 2,400 dpi. One of the samples I brought home from the show features only lettering, approximately 5 point type, in white, printed on a gray shirt. The legibility is stunning; the sharpness is extraordinary. I was amazed by the quality.

I haven’t ordered shirts recently, so I kept the business card and the sample shirts on my desk, and shelved the idea of ordering shirts from Austin’s company until last month. I created a design and had him run two sample shirts with full-color printing on a Port Authority black shirt. As part of that design, I generated a white plaque to under-print my design so it would be visible on the black garments.
I have been teaching at Cal Poly this school year, returning to the classroom after four years of retirement (one of them teaching in Munich). My course is Color Management, a third-year offering that is required for students in our bachelor’s degree program in Graphic Communication, and is also required for students in the university’s Art & Design program who are majoring in photography.
Among the topics I teach is profiling printing machines. This involves printing a color target, then measuring the printed target with a spectrophotometer, and building an ICC profile with the acquired measurements. Our department currently has several electrophotographic printers (Xerox, Ricoh, Konica-Minolta). The most capable of those is the Konica-Minolta. We also have several ink-jet machines (Epson, HP). We also have a Mark Andy flexo press with eight units, and a couple of very large format UV ink-jet printers.
What we don’t have anymore is a large format Heidelberg multi-color press. We had Heidelberg presses for over 30 years while the company was able to place a machine in our plant. But, times have changed, and Heidelberg removed their beautiful machine in 2020, and did not replace it.

I reached out to the Oregon T shirt printer for my students in Color Management. This would expose the students to machines and printing technologies not available in our region, and would also allow us to examine and measure printed output from cutting-edge machinery in this course.
I decided to measure the output of the Aeoon direct-to-garment press. I prepared a profile test target set for CMYK, and sent the files off to Newberg, Oregon, asking them to print the target sets on both black, and white shirts. For both the black and white I had them print a white under-base, and I also had them print on the white shirts without under-base white. They returned the finished goods to me a few days later, and they are beautiful.
I have been using X-Rite’s i1 Profiler software for many years, and before that, ProfileMaker, Color Blind, and a number of other profiling programs since the advent of color management in the early 1990s. This is a limited-market field for software developers, as there are a relatively small number of buyers of such software. I am grateful that X-Rite has kept their profiling software current.

With some difficulty, I put the printed shirts on top of an X-Rite i1 IO automated spectrophotometer and instructed that device to read the color patches on the shirts. When the IO encounters irregular surfaces like T shirt cloth, it slows down. For this project it slowed down all the way. Reading one side with 756 patches took about 45 minutes. The other side took as long. And, it took numerous tries to get the readings. On one pass I exited the i1 Profiler program to read my e-mail. i1 Profiler does not play well with other software, and when I returned, the program quit, angry that I had attempted to multi-task.
On the second attempt, my machine fell asleep about half-way into the first side. Waking it up caused the same problem, and I failed again. I installed a program called Jolt of Caffeine on my MacBook, and told the machine not to fall asleep for two hours. That worked. But the software, in Row 26 of 27, stopped reading and never started again. Arghh! Each of these attempts took about an hour.
On Try Number Seven I was successful in reading the entire front of the shirt. Then, after reading the back, I received an error telling me that there was too much variability in the patch readings. My only option: quit. So, I failed on the black shirt, and decided to read the white shirt (with white under-base). After 90 minutes of reading, I got the same error. So I declared defeat, and sulked for a while.

Since there is no way to repair this error, I can’t retry.
Plan B, or maybe C:
In our department at Cal Poly, we have a Roland Direct-to-Film printer that makes heat-transfer films for T shirts. I decided to take the same artwork and have it printed on two T shirts using the direct-to-film technique. One of my students made the film on the Roland printer, and transferred those images to two black shirts with white underbase (instead of printing front and back of one shirt).
They look great! The colors are vibrant, and everything looked like it was on the right track. I mounted the first of the shirts on the i1 IO spectrophotometer and began the process of profiling the Roland/transfer process. I had high hopes. After the initial calibration, the IO asks you to identify the corners of your patch sets. I did this and received a new error: the dimensions of the target set are incorrect. There was no recourse. I had to quit.
At least it didn’t wait for an hour, attempting to read the shirt before telling me that the dimensions were wrong.
I declared defeat and gave the T shirts to a couple of my students. On to another project now!