Printing is quite a complicated business, there are lots of technologies, lots of processes and lots of ways they can all be combined. Luckily you don’t have to worry about any of that, we make it all really straighforward by using the most cost-effective method for each job, this is then the price which is quoted on the site.
One of our most popular products is the 5,000 quantity of A6 Flyers, we often get emails from people commenting that the price for 5,000 A6 is very good but they actually only need 4,000 (or any other quantity between 2,500 and 5,000) and could they have a cheaper price for this. Unfortunately the answer to this question is no, and there’s a really good reason for this…
The longer-run flyers (5,000 upwards) are Litho batch printed. To understand what this is I’ll give a quick overview of how litho printing is done and then explain what batch printing is. I’ll use the A6 job as an example…
We print onto large B2 size sheets, which are just slightly bigger than regular A2… obviously the A6 flyer is quite a bit smaller than this (16 times smaller infact) so we put 16 pieces of your artwork onto one sheet.
The first step of the printing process is to mark your artwork onto metal plates (one for each colour) which are then placed into the printer to produce your printing. This is a) expensive and b) pretty time consuming. For our example lets say it costs £200 to produce the plates for your job, we then have to do the actual printing bit (paper and ink etc), to produce 5,000 A6 Flyers would require 312.5 sheets (5,000 divided by 16 as we have 16 flyers on each sheet), in actual fact we have to print quite a few more than this to get everything looking perfect but we won’t go into that.
For our example lets say it costs 5p for each sheet (cost of both the paper and ink), this brings the cost of printing the job to £15.62+£200 (for the plates), total cost: £215.62 for 5,000 A6 flyers.
Now lets look at Batch Printing…
Remember we put 16 of your flyers onto one sheet? Well what if we had 15 other flyer jobs to do at the same time, how about if we combine all those jobs together and put them onto one plate. This splits the £200 cost between 16 jobs, plate cost for each job = £12.50.
We then have to run 5,000 sheets (as each sheet only has one of each job, rather than 16) and at a cost of 5p per sheet this comes to £250, split this between the 16 jobs and it comes to £15.62 per job. Add the cost of the plates (£12.50) and the cost of running the job (£15.62) and it comes to £28.12 per job. Not bad when it would cost £215.62 to do it on it’s own.
And that it why it costs us less to print 5,000 than to print 4,000. Simple really.
(just to point out that this isn’t what it actually costs us, this really is just an example I made up!)
