At IFA 2026 in Berlin, Anker says it’s committed to launching its new EufyMake Fabric Printer in Q1 2027 as a consumer product that would enable owners to print full-color, textured graphics on garments right at home. Photos are among the images the device can handle, possibly opening a door for photographers looking to get creative with their work.

This isn’t a foreign concept to Anker, whose EufyMake E1 already exists as a product that can print on hard objects like mugs, wood, and acrylic. This prototype still has no name or price, but it has a targeted launch and fairly clear pitch, which is to shrink professional-grade Direct-to-Garment (DTG) and Direct-to-Film (DTF) printing — plus a shortcut to embroidery-style detailing — down to something that fits on a table or desk.

Two Techniques Rolled Into One Machine

Supporting both Direct-to-Garment (DTG) and Direct-to-Film (DTF) printing presents some versatility, albeit with things to consider about the output. DTG lays ink directly into the fibers of the fabric, which keeps the final print soft and breathable, which is the kind of thing you routinely see on a plain cotton T-shirt.

DTF instead prints the design onto a film, which is then heat-pressed onto the item. That leaves a thin, slightly plastic-feeling layer on the surface, but it opens the door to materials and shapes that DTG can’t handle well, like hats, shoe panels, sleeves, bags — basically anything with an irregular or curved surface.

Anker frames it more directly by saying that DTG is for soft, breathable prints, while DTF is for a wider range of materials and special effects. Both methods can work on the same piece of clothing, just not at the same time. For retailers, this means no longer owning two separate machines or sending certain jobs out because the garment doesn’t fit neatly into one printing category.

How it Works and How it Might Not

The printer uses a continuous-feed design that isn’t constrained by length. The fabric feeds through, so it’s possible to wrap a T-shirt on the surface and have the printer take care of the rest. Thickness matters, though, and that’s where there’s plenty of variety, considering items like a pillow cover, thin decorative wall hanging, or most things cotton-based are usually thinner by default. Most items, cotton or not, generally aren’t overtly thick, which is how Anker claims there’s plenty of utility to be had here.

A wall behind the printer is adorned with various examples of the types of garments or pieces the printer can deal with. They include everything from shirts, pants, tote bags, hats, shoes, jeans, wall art, and framed pieces.

Direct-to-Garment lays ink directly into the fibers of the fabric, which usually results in the fabric absorbing the ink as if it’s not there to the touch. The softness involved means the printer can only do this with natural fibers, like cotton, linen, and denim. It won’t work with synthetic materials, including polyester, as well as blends. For that, you’d have to go Direct-to-Film, which prints the design onto a film first and heat-transfers it afterward. It’s far less picky about the surface, so polyester, nylon, leather, and uneven surfaces are all fair game. It leaves a thin layer on top of the fabric rather than sinking into it, so it doesn’t have quite the same premium, breathable feel as a good DTG print. Generally speaking, the fabric ultimately determines which mode to use.

There are some variances, however, particularly for dark or colored fabrics. Printing on dark fabric is notoriously tricky for any garment printer because of how color absorbs right through rather than showing through. This printer follows the industry standard by laying down a white ink base layer first, then prints the actual colors on top of that to enable the image or graphic to appear both visible and vibrant.

A built-in camera can scan the garment before every job and automatically detect whether the surface is light or dark to then adjust the amount of white underbase ink accordingly. Users won’t have to flag that manually, Anker reps tell PetaPixel. The system doesn’t know or care what the fabric is made of, so it’s not entirely automated, but color detection alone could be enough to trigger the right ink injection.

The trade-off is that dark fabrics will use more ink and take longer to print, with light and white garments being the fastest and most economical jobs. For DTF, the printer still applies the white underbase regardless of the garment’s color since it’s baked into the transfer film itself. It changes in output when a light-versus-dark situation applies to DTG.

Double-Sided Prints, Drying, and Heat Pressing

It will be possible to print both sides of a shirt without requiring extra hardware. What matters more is timing after printing. Ink comes out of the machine wet, so it’s necessary to handle freshly printed garments carefully. A heat press is recommended to permanently bond the ink into the fabric to better survive repeated washing, but it’s not mandatory. For its part, Anker plans to offer its own heat press accessory, but any third-party heat press will work as long as the time, temperature, and pressure settings are dialed in correctly.

The Embroidery Shortcut

There’s an interesting nuance with what the printer does for embroidery. Traditional multicolor embroidery machines are expensive and slow, and it can take a considerable amount of time to turn around a single design.

Anker believes its EufyMake printer offers a cheaper workaround by running the design through an inexpensive, single-color embroidery machine to create the raised, stitched outline, then using the printer’s DTG process to lay color directly onto that stitched base. The result mimics the look of full multicolor embroidery even though the underlying thread was a uniform color to start with. The company has yet to quantify the time and cost savings in doing it this way, but there’s no doubt that switching thread colors is a time-consuming process for any embroidery machine.

Water-Based Inks

As for the inks themselves, Anker says the printer will use water-based inks that are odorless and CMR-free, so it’s not supposed to have substances classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. Should that hold up, it makes skin contact innocuous, along with a promised 50 wash-and-dry cycles without visible fading. Anker reps confirm no special care is required.

Machine and hand wash don’t matter, either way, though it might for the fabric involved. This more or less lines up with what the garment industry states as an expected life cycle for most garments. In other words, these prints don’t have special powers to ward off the kind of fading other commercial ones eventually go through, but only time and proper care will reveal the longevity involved here.

There are currently no official ink consumption figures, though as a general baseline, the printer should produce around 200 prints if the average is a standard chest-size design. That number holds up regardless of whether the job is DTG or DTF — the printer applies ink to the surface the same way either way, so the printing method itself doesn’t change consumption. Fabric type has a more marginal effect, with some materials absorbing ink more readily than others, though Anker is still gathering data to determine the final number further. The company’s own early testing suggests the difference between something as thick as denim and as thin as silk won’t be dramatic.

It’s also unclear what the ink will cost to refill. There are six tanks, similar to what some Epson ink tank printers have, except they’re naturally much bigger here.

File Formats, Resolution, and Built-In Style Filters

Setup and software have clearly been designed with non-professionals in mind, including a fairly straightforward workflow as Anker describes it: lay the garment flat on a fixture, cover it, and feed it into the machine. On the software side, Anker is leaning on the same “Idea-to-Image” workflow style it uses on the E1 to help people who aren’t trained designers put together printable artwork without a steep learning curve.

Anker reps say the printer’s software will be pretty agnostic on file formats, supporting JPG, PNG, TIFF, and SVG, among others. What’s interesting is the system also isn’t very picky about how “print-ready” a file is. A plain screenshot or a downloaded photo, without any bleed setup, color profile conversion, or resizing, reportedly prints without issue. That’s a departure from traditional print workflows, where sending an unprepared file to a commercial printer is a common way to get a rejected order back.

Resolution still matters because of how ink spreads slightly once it hits fabric, unlike a fixed-pixel display. The rule of thumb here is to start with source images at a noticeably higher resolution than the target print size — knowing to expect roughly a 10-15% loss in effective sharpness once ink saturation is factored in. Vector files like SVGs sidestep this problem entirely, since they can scale without any quality loss.

Unsurprisingly, the software will also include built-in AI style tools that can convert a plain photo into a watercolor, oil-painting, or manga-like visual before printing. Anker says this is part of its Make It Real and eufyMake apps that will also pull from a community-driven library of styles. The pitch is that a user doesn’t need separate editing software to stylize an image when that step can take place inside the printer’s own app.

Even so, photographers and artists who prefer to do it their own way won’t be held back if they’d rather stick to their own workflow. None of the displayed examples were photos, but Anker reps clarified there’s no reason they couldn’t be. Turning a photo into a vector, a bunch of photos into a collage, or some other creative direction is all perfectly suitable using this device.

The Copyright and Content Part

What about printing copyrighted logos or other IP users have no legal right to produce? The short answer is there are currently no restrictions to offset that. Anker reps acknowledged a case involving the company’s E1 printer where a user successfully printed a “realistic” counterfeit currency bill — albeit only one-sided. It’s not clear how the printer could automatically detect and block specific logos from going to print. Maybe AI, but all reps could tell PetaPixel is that the company will need to explore this further since nothing exists today.

Given the printer can do reasonable volume, legal action probably isn’t out of the question depending on the circumstances and brand involved. It’s not hard to find high-res images of everything from brand logos to celebrities and on to pop culture material of varying types, opening up a world of possibilities.

Another question is what happens when someone wants to print hateful or offensive material rather than pirated IP. Reps indicate they are treating this with greater concern and a higher priority than copyright infringement and unlicensed material. Unless Anker announces some sort of safeguard for that, the machine doesn’t stop it as currently developed. The final price point will put it out of purchasing range for vengeful teens, for instance, but not necessarily the enterprising types who have the money and want to go into business for themselves with shady material. It’s hard to know until the product launches, but this all could loom larger later on.

Fitting Next to the EufyMake E1

To get a sense of what the Fabric Printer might be like, the EufyMake E1, which has been available since its initial Kickstarter launch, prints on rigid and semi-rigid objects, like wood, metal, glass, ceramics, and acrylic, with genuine 3D-texture printing up to 5mm using Anker’s Amass3D technology.

It’s a different tool for a different job. The E1 handles hard-surface personalization, while the new fabric printer is aimed at soft goods and apparel. Anker isn’t retiring the E1 with this launch — the same announcement unveiling the Fabric Printer also detailed E1 upgrades, including a free bidirectional-printing update that doubles print speed on existing units, a Roll-to-Film attachment, and a high-capacity continuous ink system arriving later this year.

Entering Uncharted Waters

Anker hasn’t hidden the fact that what it’s showing at IFA is a prototype rather than a finished consumer product. It’s been gathering feedback from prospective users through a co-creation program before committing to final specs. The only certainty, such as it is, is the Q1 2027 launch window. No name, no price, and no final feature list have been confirmed. For context, entry-level professional DTG machines currently start around $8,000 and typically require separate pretreatment equipment and ongoing maintenance contracts — the gap this new desktop machine is explicitly trying to close.