Colour commercial printer, recommendation?

[David Hammond]

Low Cost?

What turnaround times & Quality are you looking for?

[Martin.Smith]

Its like a parish magazine, but published weekly and about 30-40 pages. Total cost of the print run needs to be about 60p per.

Print quality needs to be fair photo quality, if that makes sense. Imagine pictures of cat up tree etc.

[Colin Crabb]

Guessing something like 130gsm gloss throughout (self cover) ?

Most commercial printers should be able to turn out a 40pp, A5, full colour, stitch finished from direct artwork for around 25p based on a 20k run. (I priced this at approx. £5000 for 20k run = 25p per booklet + VAT), You might find cheaper online, BUT Your only issue will be the turnaround & delivery speed.

My advice is to find a large commercial litho printer near you with an 8 or 10 colour B2 press and inline finishing – those machines eat these types of jobs. If this mag’s weekly, they’d bite your hand off for a £260k+ yearly contract and meet delivery requirements.

[Martin.Smith]

Thanks Colin, I was actually thinking of buying the printer myself and adding it to the "fleet" 🙂

[Colin Crabb]

For a 20k run you’d have to go litho – digital would be to slow & expensive, litho will always win on this volume.

A ‘cheap’ digital printer (something like a xerox phaser, costs about 5k) runs at 2500 sheets per hour, HP Indigo (depending on model, 50k – 150k+) runs at a max speed of 4000 sheets per hour safely, compared to a Heidelberg speedmaster (500k ++++) which runs at 15,000 sheets per hour – and twice the sheet size.

I’d really avoid the digital route on this job, time factor would be an issue and your ‘click’ cost would out price the job (Click cost is the amount your charged per side/sheet – yes you can buy the machine outright and purchase your own toner / electrostatic ink, but this is very expensive route to go down if you doing volume printing as you also have to purchase all comsummables, so drums, waste carts, belts etc etc), I think your typical charged 5-7p per click for an SRA3 sheet, per side, so therefore a 40pp booklet would cost around 50-70p on ink only, without paper cost, running cost etc.

Hope this helps you decided – I use to run a commercial printers with both litho & digital setups. 20k, 40pp run – litho all the way, I’d not even consider trying to run this on a office type of xerox machine or even a HP indigo.

[Martin.Smith]

Thats great thank you 🙂

At what level of (lower) volume does a digital start to make sense? I suspect the current printers are using digital.

[Colin Crabb]

On a 40pp booklet? – around 500 run, 1000 if there was a time factor involved (eg 24hr turnaround) but at a premium cost of around £750 for a 40pp, A5 full colour run on 130gsm silk or gloss.

Digital print is very very good for smaller print-on-demand runs, most commercial printers will run both a digital press along side litho presses, by digital I’m referring to a commercial production machine, eg HP indigo, Xerox Docutech series etc.

Yes I agree current printers are using digital, but not at the volume your talking about, don’t think even an iGen would be able to hit the price mark for 20k full colour run.

I only sold out my stake last year and still involved with some very large commercial printers, there is some new tech coming onto the market that may change things in the future with inkjet based webpresses like HP’s T series.

[Martin.Smith]

Great info, thank you 🙂

So it really has to be litho even for when the magazine drops its circulation at quiet times. Smallest they are talking about is probably 7/8 sheets of A4 folded and stapled to give the A5 booklet. And probably never really running to less than 1000 copies.

Any suggestions for a nice litho setup?

[Colin Crabb]

Litho presses – can’t go wrong with Heidelberg top machines.
We did also get a 4 colour Ryobi 524 at one point, was a second user machine, think we paid around £30k for it, not bad kit but wasn’t my favorite.

Do you have any Litho equipment at the moment? If not your need to add a plate maker also.

A 8 sheet (16pp) 1000 run would roughly work out at £350 run on digital press. Its the bigger 40pp 20k run that’s out of range! Hence why you have digital & litho together. Massive difference between 1000 & 20k run!

Konica Minolta are currently pushing a new ranges, might be worth having a chat with them (I keep getting rep’s & phone calls this month hehehhe), I always liked Xerox, check them out too, they have some kits designed for magazine / brochure printing with inline finishing units.
Ask them about click costs etc, then your be able to work out some rough costs -perhaps then you only need to send the large runs away to a trade printer.