Do you know any alternatives to these services? I've used cafepress in the past, to print 6 color shirts and they came out pretty good. They were pricier than I would've liked, but I wasn't purchasing a quantity where I could find cheaper alternatives.
As far as I know, the cost is determined by the process and the quantity. Screen-printed shirts start out expensive, because you have to make one screen for every color (at $60-$180 per screen, I seem to recall, though it's been a year or more since I last got shirts), but get cheaper as the quantities increase because the screen is good for hundreds or thousands of shirts and it's really fast to do. The lifetime of screen printed shirts is much longer than the inkjet style printed shirts, I believe, as well. But, realistically, I'm not sure how precise screens can get--really intricate designs are out of reach of that process, I guess (I dunno, all my shirts are two color).
I believe there is a new multi-color process (a few years old, which is bleeding edge in the print industry) that apparently does high color prints at high speed, but I don't know how many providers actually have such a machine, or if the costs are competitive with screen printing.
I'd be curious who prints the shirts for the Mozilla Foundation. I love my Firefox shirt. It looks great, has at least four or five colors, and has held up well.
Yeah, you're actually better served by Cafepress (at least in terms of price) in small quantities. I think a lot of the reason ours were so bad was we used a lot of half tones and the ink didn't take well.
It did fade rapidly too. Luckily we only got a handful of them.
