Quality Cheap Printing

There are certainly plenty of ways to cut costs with your printing, but you don't want to cut back on the quality. If it looks cheap it reflects poorly on your business image. Many printers will offer you very cheap deals  but beware, you may end up with cut price flimsy stock, poor graphic design that doesn't look much better than something someone has done at home with Microsoft Word, and poor print and colour quality. You will often pay for what you get, but there are ways to save money without suffering on the quality of your printing and design.

If you are a small to medium business, it's probably not advisable to go through a print management company. Obviously larger companies require this type of service as they have a lot of printing to manage through many departments, but smaller businesses should find a designer and a printer that they like and stick with them. By all means though, shop around first to get some quotes and and assess the quality of their work. Print management companies can mark up the actual cost of the printing by as much as 100% and you won't get any more for your money than if you went to to the printer directly yourself. 

Digital printing technology has come a long way and can be a great solution if you only require a small quantity, say a couple of hundred copies or less. The quality these days can be every bit as good as press printing, but once you get into higher quantities it is no longer economical. Offset printing presses are much better equipped for large runs and can do the job at a much better price. Basically the higher the quantity, the less you will pay per copy on a printing press.

A popular way to do cheaper print runs these days is by ganging up full colour jobs on a large printing press. Full colour printing uses a 4 colour ink printing process called CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black). Therefore using those same 4 inks they can print a variety of different jobs on the same print run, on a large stock size. For example, they may wait until they have 40 different business card orders for 40 different businesses, and gang them all up onto the same set of plates and print them in the one press run. This saves the printer a lot of money not having to make separate plates and saves time by not having  to set up the machine many times over. The money they save allows them to offer much cheaper prices to the clients than someone who has to print each card individually. The only downside is that the colour may vary slightly between print runs, as they are not colour matching the individual jobs. But I have used these printers and found the printing to be of very good quality at a much cheaper price. This is great if you are on a tight budget and you can still utilise full colour for your design rather than just a 1 or 2 colour print run which often costs more but looks cheaper.

If you have a specific colour that represents your company or your logo that you need to match every time then you will need to use offset printing rather than digital printing to really keep your colour consistent. If this is the case, try cutting back to a single colour print run or a 2 colour print run if you want to save money. The more inks you run on a press the higher the cost. This printing process uses Pantone or 'spot' colours. They have a colour chart in a Pantone book and your printer will match to this chart every time to maintain colour consistency. One example of really wasting money is to print multiple spot colours on a simple envelope. Your costs will go through the roof. Keep it simple and save.