At Printhouse, we’re fortunate (or perhaps it’s down to good advance planning) to have several presses under the same roof to cover pretty much any LITHO print requirement – the resulting client benefits include the ensuring of long term brand and colour consistency (as opposed to sending various jobs suited to different presses to five different printers) and a cost-effective end product.
With increasing pressures for so many people, giving clients this peace of mind and freeing up their time when it comes to placing print requirements, it’s a major benefit.
How do we choose which machine to set up and print your project on? There are numerous factors to consider and our estimating system helpfully works out the most practical route for any range of quantities.
For most multi page full colour projects we use our B1 size presses enabling us to print the equivalent of 16 or 18 A4 size pages as a printed “section” – fewer plates and less set up time equal lower cost, coupled with consistency of colour and the ability to complete speedily, as required.
We also use the same large format option for many multi page documents printed black only, as our presses can be set up to “perfect”. This entails printing both sides of material via a single pass through the machine, resulting in overall cost saving and speed of completion, as pretty much halves the overall print time. Clever stuff.
Savings are not just made on the initial set up and printing side – using larger sheets will also reduce set up / machine running time for most finishing elements (brochure or booklet making, binding, even creasing/folding smaller brochure/leaflet formats).
By passing on the “ideal” sizes in advance (when there’s still time to work to specific page counts or dimensions), over the last 22 years we will have saved our clients many thousands of pounds … and reduced material wastage as a further bonus.
So why have a smaller press at all? For jobs such as business cards, stationery and leaflets of low volume, especially those set up to print as one or two defined spot colours only, it can make sense to print the equivalent of 4 x A4 pages – the cost of producing plates is lower and setting up generally uses less paper/card than their larger equivalent FYI, B1 machines can use circa 500 set up sheets per section when printing in full colour …
We’re on hand to offer advice as to the ideal “cut-off” point to switch from one press to another – for any chosen route, as all our machines are Heidelberg – vorsprung durch technik – optimum quality is assured at all times.
For your print projects on the horizon, please try us for size …
