Do you know when it is best to print something yourself, verses using a professional printing service? With a time and a place for both, it is important to know the pros and cons of both options, as well as what is involved for both printing methods. We’ll also discuss using DIY design verses using a professional designer, which as a printing company, we have plenty of opinions about!
What Can DIY Printing Offer?
Reports, flyers, meeting minutes, timetables, labels, letterheads, permission slips, lesson plans, student handouts, certificates and even questionnaires are routinely printed on A4 laser, desktop, or inkjet printers all over the country. The convenience they offer to businesses, schools, clubs, and charities is huge, being easily available, simple to use and immediate job completion. The cost of the printer and paper is relatively cheap, though the affordability of replacement ink is debatable.
On the other hand, DIY printing can cause all sorts of problems and issues for the user, including printer maintenance, paper jams, low print quality, paper and file margin setup, small print volumes, slow printing and of course, the high cost of replacement ink.
What Can Professional Printing Offer?
Professional printing is undertaken by printing businesses such as us. As a printer, we have the knowledge, the machinery, the experience and can access a variety of printing materials. Many different types of businesses, organisations, clubs’ schools, and individuals use a professional printer for jobs of all sizes, though larger print jobs are more common.
It does cost more to use a printing service, it is not as convenient as printing at home or in the office, and there will be a time period and possibly shipping costs until you receive the completed job. However, all the hard work of sourcing materials, ensuing the print quality is excellent, achieving 100% printing accuracy and leaving the entire job to someone else are definite positives!
Choosing Between Professional Printing and DIY Printing
When it is time to decide whether you will choose to do your own printing, or hire a professional printer, here are some questions to answer which will help you to choose the best option:
- What are you wanting to print?
- Do you have the required machinery available to use?
- What sort of quantities and sizes are you wanting the finished products to be?
- Do you know the best materials to use for your printing job?
- What is your budget?
- Is your printing file formatted correctly?
- What level of quality do you want the finished products to be?
- Do you have the time to organise and then complete the print job?
- Does your print file require professional graphic design skills?
Basically, it all boils down to two key points:
- DIY printing is best for very small jobs that are to be printed on A4 paper, where high quality printing of text and graphics is not required.
- Professional printing is best for small to large sized print jobs which require high quality printing of all sizes and on all types of printing stock.
Now you have made the decision to work with a printing business, let’s look at what your print ready file needs to have.
Print Ready Files Are Needed for Professional Printing
When a client requests our printing services, they need to do one of three things:
- Give us a print ready file created by a graphic designer
- Give us a print ready file they have made themselves
- Tell us what they want printed, provide the graphics and text, and ask us to create the print ready file for them
Our favourite option is to set up the print file for you. We know our requirements inside out and that there will be no editing required and that the completed print job will look amazing. We can also use supplied files. However, what we regularly receive from our DIY clients is a file that we need to spend a lot of time fixing so that it can be printed appropriately. This adds to your printing turnaround times.
We have a written guide on what a print ready file must have, and we are happy to answer questions to help you create your own if you are taking the DIY route.
Key Benefits of Outsourcing to a Professional Printer
We might be biased, but with very good reasons; we know that when you choose to have your job printed by a professional printer instead of doing it yourself, you:
- Enjoy professional and high-quality results
- Save time and resources
- Have access to a large variety of printing materials, including card and paper stock, vinyl and brandable products
- Can have almost anything, any size and any quantity printed
- Have an experienced team ready to ensure 100% accuracy of the finished products
- Save on costs, thanks to efficient and error free printing and no machinery to maintain
By using the services of a printing company such as us, you have plenty of printable products to select from including brochures, greeting cards, calendars and diaries, marketing materials, pull up banners, product branding and packaging, and stickers. Look through our standard printing product range, and if what you want is not there, get in touch because we can source what you need too!