Why full color printing prices vary so much

If you’ve ever had any full color marketing materials printed then you probably know that the price for a particular job can vary quite a bit from one printing company to another. As the end user who just handles the finished product, this may not make much sense and as a result, it?s common for clients to see a price for a large quantity print job and expect the same cost per piece when ordering a few hundred pieces. Understanding what factors can affect the price of full color printing will help you to plan your marketing more effectively while making it easier to deal with your marketing firm, printer or graphic designer.

• A large portion of the price of full color printing is in the set up, which requires a considerable amount of work even with today’s technology. Before a print job can even be started, all of the files need to be checked to ensure that they are all in the proper format and color mode and that all of the necessary fonts are available. Then the plates that transfer the ink to the paper must be created, and four-color printing requires four different plates (one each for cyan, magenta, yellow and black). The next step is to put these plates on the press and run paper through it until each of the plates have achieved the proper ink coverage, at which point the press operator will adjust the alignment of each plate. It’s only after all of these steps have been completed that your print job can begin. Because the set up is the largest factor in the price of a print job, you will often see negligible price differences between various quantities.
• The way a print job is set up can make a tremendous difference in price as well. For example, rather than running an individual print job on an 11″ x 17″ sheet of paper, a printer may run several jobs on a much larger sheet of paper to save on the set up costs, and then cut each individual job from that large sheet. This is called “gang running” a print job and can help to save a lot of money, but usually requires more time because the sheet must be full before printing and must be cut after printing.
• The type of full color printing will also impact the price. While you can have your print job printed digitally in small quantities, your cost per unit will be much higher than the more cost effective offset printing. This is because rather than using ink and plates to put an image on paper, digital printing uses toner which is considerably more expensive.

There are some ways to get the best of both worlds however. For example, if you have a brochure that contains frequently changing information, you could have shells printed which would contain only the information that will remain the same, and then digitally print the information that changes through a local quick printer such as Kinkos or Sir Speedy, or even print them on your own laser printer if the document will fit.