Printing & Copying

Postcard printing is one of the most popular printing services there are. Simply, it is a printing service you can easily avail among numerous online commercial printers present on the internet.

As with any process with steps involved and certain requirements needed, it is sometimes unavoidable for certain details to be missed out in postcard printing.

There are also aspects that are left out just because of the numerous things you have in mind. To this, the only practical advice is to avoid rushing your job and always double check your postcard designs for errors, either in the design, text or the file itself.

What You Tend to Forget with Online Postcard Printing
Aside from the simple steps you would have to take to successfully complete your job order, do not forget these following information so you can print faster and smoother.

1. Waive the Proofing Option
If you are confident that after reviewing your own file, there are no errors present whatsoever, from the text to the design itself. And if you are certain that you have followed all the printers’ requirements, you can then waive the proof and forego.

This means that you do not want any proof and that once you have paid your job order in full, the printing company will send it for productions.

Waiving the proof option, is of course, ideal for rush printing. But it has its risks because once your prints are run with errors in them, you cannot hold the printing company liable.

2. Turnaround Times
Turnaround times are the production times. This is the number of days it takes the printing company to finish processing your prints. It only applies once you have approved the proof and paid you order in full.

Turnaround time does not cover the time you are accomplishing your job order. It does not include shipping rates and it does not, most importantly, apply on weekends and holidays.

3. Shipping Rates
Most of the time, shipping rates are not included in the printing quotes. However, there are printing companies who provide clients with an access to view the shipping rates by putting in their zip code.

What’s more, in some postcard printing companies, the weight of the number of your postcard orders are taken into consideration once you try to get the shipping rates for 500 postcards or 100,000 postcards. The shipping rates are updated and takes your input data for computing the rates.

4. Next Day Hard Copy Proof
For huge postcard orders and for those who are meticulous about the color quality of their postcards, you can obtain hardcopy proofs which will be mailed to you the next day.

Where else can you get this kind of service other than a professional printing company who can provide you the color accuracy you need? Hard copy proofs, however, still needs to be approved and signed for your prints to run.

5. Aqueous or Gloss Coating
There are various card stocks available for your postcard printing projects. However, if you have chosen a gloss stock for your postcards, mind you that your postcards are already to be printed with a layer of Aqueous coating. This is of course free.

You do not have to ask for additional gloss or Aqueous coating for your prints, unless you specifically want to even with this knowledge. Remember, gloss coated stocks have a soft film of shine. If you want a truly reflective, glossy surface, then you might want to opt for a UV coated stock.

There are still many aspects to postcard printing left to be explored. As for now, these are but some of the information and details that many tend to forget. These are but some of your options which you should only become familiar with in due time.

For now, it helps to ask your postcard printer and know just what you can do to make your postcard printing much easier and simpler through time.

Digital cameras have rapidly gained acceptance as the main camera product that people now buy. The rise of the digital camera and the high quality home printers now available mean that we no longer need to rely on the traditional photo developer for our prints. It has become very much a shoot and print exercise for consumers without any delay or inconvenience that even a one hour developer means for us.

The ability to shoot our own pictures as many times as we like without having to worry about rolls of film together with the convenience that the home computer revolution has brought us has led to a huge surge in profits for ink manufacturers worldwide. These huge profits have in turn led to a massive range of genuine and substitute ink cartridge suppliers coming to the market while the quality varies enormously.

While home digital printing has lagged behind the sale and use of digital camera because of the concerns over print quality and the advent of easier digital print facilities at many outlets such as Wal-Mart, modern printers and particularly the printer ink that is used has improved enormously. Printer ink that is used for making prints needs to be of a higher quality than that used for straight text printing. This used to be monopolized by the printer manufacturers themselves with highly priced, high margin ink cartridges that had hard to replicate cartridge head mechanisms.

Canon, Epson, Lexmark and Hewlett-Packard are the top four brand name manufacturers who have used their position as printer manufacturers to make cartridge replication as difficult as possible in order to ensure tat consumers buy their ink. Many customers often wonder at the low price of a hi-tech printer but do not realize that the bulk of the revenue and profit that these manufacturers are going to make is not on the printer but on the ink that you have to keep buying again and again.

Third party printer cartridge manufacturers have started making a dent in this effective monopoly as the manufacturing technology becomes more widely available. Canon and Epson in particular have effectively contracted out manufacturing of a large range of their printer cartridges and have allowed clone copies to be manufactured under license. Hewlett-Packard has vigorously tried to restrict clone cartridge copying by legal restrictions and increasing the technical complexity of the ink cartridge and integrating the printer head with the cartridge body.

Despite the big four dominating the ink cartridge market at the moment their grip is slowly being released while the actual demand for photo quality ink cartridges is expected to continue to increase much as it has been over the last three years. The major consideration for consumers when buying clone ink cartridges is that the ink itself is good enough to produce the print finish and that they do not get short changed with a cheaper clone cartridge that does not in fact contain as much ink as the genuine cartridge.