Printing Quality and Prices

In today's printing market it can be very hard to find a good balance of reasonable  pricing and quality when choosing a printing company to handle your companies printing needs. This post will outline some of the basic things to look at along with some basic questions to ask your prospective printing company when making decisions. I hope you find thus useful and it provides you the basic knowledge you need to have a successful print buying experience. If you have any unanswered question after reading this post please fell free to give us a call at (512) 501-6324 and we will be happy to help.

Let's start using business cards as an example. As explained in our previous post about business cards, they are your 1st impression to a prospective customer. Always keep that in mind when weighing price and quality. There are many different printing techniques available for business cards such as thermography, foil embossing, and full color digital offset. Let's use full color offset printing for our discussion. There are places online where you can order one thousand full color business cards for around $30.00 + shipping. This is a good price I agree. Now we need to find out the specifics to see how good of a deal it really is by weighing price and quality. What kind of paper stock are the business cards printed on? Business cards should not be printed on anything lighter than 14pt cover stock, preferably 16pt. What you find in most of the places online is that they are printed on 12pt or less. Does your company require certain Pantone colors be matched exactly for their logo and marketing materials. If so than it is very important for you to ask your prospective printing company if they provide Pantone matching services. most online printing companies do not and you definitely will not get Pantone matching for $30.00. If you do not need Pantone matching services make sure your printer uses the industry standard of acceptable color for digital offset printing. Next thing to ask is if they guarantee the cutting of the business cards. Business cards do get cut unevenly sometimes because of a malfunction in the slitter. just make sure if this happens they will reprint at no charge. There is nothing worse than a crooked business card.

That is all the time I have for today but we will continue this discussion with a Part 2 soon!