When you want to get beautiful color prints without breaking your budget, you should consider offset printing. It used to be that offset printing requires large volume for minimum orders, but with the developments in printing, minimum orders have gone down. Now, you can order as little as 100 pieces for posters, and a few hundreds for other smaller items.
You can print out full-colored flyers for a single event or for a seasonal promo, without worrying about having truckloads of them in your basement later on. More importantly, you can print larger format materials than your standard 8.5 x11 legal paper.
Digital Offset Printing vs. Inkjet Printing
Offset does not limit it self. There are other materials such as paper labels, matte and high gloss paper to name a few other available stocks.
You can now put your trusty inkjet printers to rest and let the big boys come to the rescue. Photo quality inkjets are made for small prints and business documents, and have more expensive ink (not to mention paper). Colored copiers on the other hand have poorer print quality than the rich photographic prints of commercial printers.
Commercial digital printers, on the other hand, come at par with offset when it comes to print quality and longevity. And like the inkjet printers at home, it has carved out a name in printing for short order prints. But even though it is as effective as offset prints, digital prints are still quite expensive to afford one your bulk printing needs.
Unlike offset prints where the cost goes down dramatically, the change in cost for inkjet printing only goes down marginally. When the printing volume goes to more than a few dozens, it will be cheaper to print a hundred offset than to have the exact amount printed digitally.
Printing Cheaply with Offset
1. Commercial printing companies use offset to print volumes of prints. These are favored for being efficient and cost-effective. At the same time, it turns out consistent, well-defined prints that makes every print produced count.
2. A wide range of print products can be purchased in offset. From business cards to greeting cards, multi-page documents such as newsletters, booklets or catalogs and calendars, to small stickers.
3. Different print jobs are laid out together in a single sheet also known as a gang-run. When you run different print jobs as a single plate, on a single sheet, the cost of plating and set-up is distributed over a number of jobs, making printing cost-effective.
4. You can have a number of sizes for your offset prints. Aside from the standard and common sizes available for certain products, you can produce prints in your own desired size with no problem. There are even printing companies out in the market who would allow you to print as large as 12” x 18” without undergoing custom printing.
The developments in digital technology have rubbed off on offset printing, and are passed down to the users. This means you can afford to have your marketing materials printed professionally and cheaply at the same time. Added to this, you can enjoy them soon enough for offset prints also possess short turnaround time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Business cards
By: Candy | 24-10-2008
How do I type out and print my own business cards, not graphics, just my name, hobby and phone number?
What Digital Printer should Ibuy?
By: Paddy Cribben | 21-10-2008
1 stoney*i am looking at buying a digital printer and wonder for all round performance (quality of print being important) would
People reccomend konica minolta, canon or xerox?
Why web pages cropped?
By: Skinnyman | 16-10-2008
How do you print web pages without part of the text being cropped so that you cannot read the whole sentence?
Stop Adobe Acrobat from opening
By: Linda Salant | 11-10-2008
how do I keep acrobat from opening every time I print to PDF? I don't want to display the file after I print it... I just want to print it.
Any one hear of a company "D.I.P. printing ...
By: mine | 02-10-2008
any one hear of a company "D.I.P. printing", queens, NY not sure if its in Queens going or gone out of business??
How do you change the size of the text and map ...
By: Pam | 19-09-2008
how do you change the size of the text and map when using Mapquest? Just lately it prints out very small, but none of the other things I print do that.
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