Hello! we have been doing sublimation for over 20 years. There are a few things you need to know. Yes you need polyester based coatings or polyester . so for most items you mentioned they will work as long as they are purchased from a sublimation vendor like Johnson Plastics Plus, Conde, JDS, Marco, CAT, etc. That way are are guaranteed be coated for sublimation. Always look as ceramic mugs can have different coatings which will effect how well it looks. Some have a hard coating, some have a softer coating.
As far as the 100% cotton shirts, sublimation paper will not work. It will not bond to the fabric. There is not really a 1 step process for printing onto black. There are self weeding heat transfer papers made for laser printers that would be a better solution, they all have a softer hand feel in my opinion than Subliflock/SubliCloth. We have experimented with the dark apparel papers, but never really felt they were good enough to our standards to market them. There are even white based toner printers, but those are expensive. Those use a white base to help the colors pop. There is also a new paper offered by Conde that is made for work around to cotton, but I have never tried it. There is also Subliflock/SubliCloth by Johnson plastics that also works. You essentially print, press the flock and then stick it back in the press to adhere to the cotton. I have tried it years ago, still have a bunch here. It works well, but there is a lot of hard hand feel to it. Depending upon your design will also affect how thick it feels. If your doing a solid photo it will be very noticeable.
I have never worked with a sublimation vinyl, other than decal vinyl. So I can't help you out with that. I am not sure if there is one made for sublimation that would work to adhere to apparel or not? Never looked into it. Regular vinyl for apparel is common, but you would use a vinyl cutter and different color vinyl
We essentially have one of the SG400's ourselves (previous version with the Ricoh name sticker) Sawgrass teamed up with Ricoh to rebrand the SN3110dn essentially. 400 takes letter size and legal size only. If you want anything bigger you woudl need the SG800 or larger. I would say they would be worth the investment if you are serious about doing it in-house. Sublimation printers are not something you want to get into and use a few times a year. The Ricoh's are much better at sitting around not being used than Epson ever were. but they still need to be run often so they don't clog up. We run our Ricoh as a backup printer, so it sits idle a lot at times. The Ricoh's basically changed the landscape for small format sublimation, essentially knocking epson out of small format sublimation.
Stay away from anything that is Epson if you are not doing mass production. They clog up bad. We have gone through about 18 printers in 20 years all but 4 were/are Epsons. We currently run a Ricoh SG3110dn and a Mutoh RJ900X wide format 44" Technically Anything but a Ricoh uses Epson print head technology, but from our experience they seem to be more trustworthy and stable. The Ricoh's basically changed the landscape for small format sublimation, essentially knocking epson out of small format sublimation.
I hope this helps you in your search.
