Welcome to the America's #1 Printer Cartridge Official Blog

By: Carla San Gaspar

Mention discount printing and a person may think twice about quality, especially with something as critical as working on your marketing materials. Rest assured though that most of these fears are baseless, and larger printing companies with more professional machinery provide prints cheaper.

In printing, a change in the way prints are done can spell the difference of as much as 50% of the price cost. Just compare the printing cost of online printing as against a small local printing company to get a clear picture of the price difference. There are several factors that affect the price of your printing.

Here are a few tidbits about how big companies can afford to sell cheap:

• Economies of Scale:

In simple terms, an increase in the scale of production brings down the cost to produce individual units. There are several reasons why the overall cost per print goes down as the output of a printer increases.

1) Printing companies order their supplies like paper and ink from third party suppliers. The large volume can be used as leverage to get bigger wholesale discounts from these third party suppliers.

2) Large businesses have to maintain an efficient work flow to keep up with the printing demands. They have to train their employees, and with repetitive work, they gain more experience and skill in their specialized area. This minimizes wastage and maximizes productivity.

3) Fixed overhead costs are spread over a larger volume of print jobs. Overhead costs are sometimes unrelated to the print job itself, but should nonetheless be recovered by the business. The rent of the factory for instance, or the cost to hire management is spread over more print jobs.

• New Technology:

4) Investing in new equipment allows printing companies to automate many tedious and laborious processes that cut additional costs. The computer to plate technology for instance cuts a big portion of the prepress process that used to involve manually developing plates, stripping the negative to plate, etc.