BC90000 or so: People start wearing shirts.

AD1990 or so: We [a largely unidentified group of us] start talking about making shirts for people to wear.

AD1990-AD2001: Turns out that making shirts would cost a lot; we go off and do other stuff instead.

Summer AD2001: Having gone off to do other stuff instead, a couple of us return to the concept of shirts, screenprinting out a few ideas onto black ones.

October AD2001: Having screenprinted up thousands of shirts, I [of We] happen across CafePress.com, where commercialgrade ironons can be affixed to white shirts without spending thousands of bucks in advance on screenprinting.

AD2001-AD2005: Time passes, according to its job description.

AD2005: I happen across a different DotCom which flockprint black shirts on demand. The short story there is that they happen to suck at it.

November AD2005: CafePress.com announce the betatest for their own black shirts: opaque colours printed directly into the fabric. Good news.

December AD2005: The betatest begins to display alphatest problems.

16th December AD2005: UPS hand off a bunch of black shirts I'd ordered to see how bad this alphabetatest actually was.

18th December AD2005: I get round to hitting the prototypes with a DigiCam....

[click on each shot for a 7.xMegaPixel 2.xGigaByte ServerKiller Image]

1. Three black shirts. Normal mode. Flash on.

2. Three black shirts. Lowlight mode. Flash off.

3. Three black shirts. Normal mode. Flash off.

4. WastedLogo shirt. Normal mode. Flash off. White book in shot for comparative reference.

5. IdioticDesign.com shirt. Normal mode. Flash off.

6. Coffeethulhu shirt. Normal mode. Flash off. White book in shot for comparative reference.

7. Hunter wearing Coffeethulhu shirt. Normal mode. Flash on.

8. Hunter wearing IdioticDesign.com shirt. Normal mode. Flash on.

9. Hunter wearing WastedLogo shirt. Normal mode. Flash on.

Incidentally, the shirts in question are at wastedinc.com:

The thumbnails, above, have been artificially darkened by CafePress.com's server...slightly darker, in fact, than they should be to convey the darkness inherent in the printing process.

My conclusions:

The WastedLogo shirt, while darker than the pure #FFFFFF white used in the original file, isn't all that bad. The 'white' dropped down to about #D4D4D4, as indicated in the darkened thumbnail; but it kinda works for that, in a way. The bad news is that, when pure white is required on a shirt, this greyish result can still be expected. At least for the moment.

The IdioticDesign.com shirt is darker still. To the extent that anyone comparing the result IRL to the original would see a disappointing difference.

The Coffeethulhu shirt sucks. It's that simple. The original at coffeechick.com [technically, I'd reworked the colours slightly in PhotoshopCS2 for the printed version, just to guarantee that it would work in CYMK as well as RGB, which, of course, didn't work, in the end] and the result are similar in shape, but that's as good as it gets. Somehow, the three greens in the original got downgraded into a single, dark shade on the shirt which is nearly identical to the black outlines separating them; the slight difference in the two greys on the coffeemug in the original, though, are now in stark contrast on the shirt: the lighter shade remaining near the original ash grey and the darker shading dropping down beneath slate grey without explanation; the whites of the eyes, with the black outlines being lost to the blackish green beyond, have also dropped to light grey and lost the whole point of making the eyes white in the first place. Not good.

On the bright side, CafePress.com do kick ass when it comes to free replacements. In dealing with white shirts over the years, I've had a good dozen different things replaced and overnighted out without any extra charges [we'll take it as read that sitting on hold for five minutes of airtime on my mobilephone before getting to someone who can authorise the replacements is an incidental bit of cash I could otherwise have spent on TootsieRolls]; so, I'm reasonably confident that, in the end, I'll have no trouble getting one or all of these replaced by something worth having bought.

In more fairness, this process being somewhere in the alphabeta range, things are improving by the hour now. Worstcase, the betatesting is expected to be over and done with by the end of March, by which time we'll also likely be seeing the process used on black sweatshirts and things. So the extent of the warning here is really that black shirts purchased through Wasted, Inc. from the supplier at CafePress.com stand a chance of sucking over the next twelve weeks, in which worstcase a quick call to a tollfree number should lead to a quick replacement. If that's too much work for the average customer: hold off on buying black shirts for a couple more months. They'll be there when you get back.

Meanwhile, instead of hitting and missing with more black shirts, I'll probably concentrate more on LightWaving out some more stuff for posters and other photorealistic sorts of prints. I did this one mostly for Hunter, who'd guessed [potentially accurately] that I could get a better shot with CG of mountains than she's been able to get with her DigiCam IRL:

Final render.

Screenshot of the LightWave setup; click for 1280*768 fullshot.

UPDATE:

Adding an A10 to the LightWave scene. Results to follow once this thing is done rendering several million polygons.