Let me tell you things to take note of for using 4 color printing services, it's not just the cost it takes that is important, but the time it takes to get the job done especially for small business printing. I had a 4 color printing job for a seminar the other week at a national conference of aeronautical engineers and designers, and was to give a presentation. Read more for my unlucky incidence.
Power point is a little stale, many people believe, and so I thought that I'd hand out everyone their own personal and personalized printouts of my stats with places where they can make their own notes as well as a form which they can use to send them back to me, and ask questions and give feedback.
But, unfortunately, I was way behind schedule, and was only able to give the job to the laser color printer place four days before the scheduled event was to take place, so there was a rush on the order, and it was more expensive than a normal order.
When I got it back, I thought my 4 color printing job was alright, after briefly looking through the printout. Everything was ready for the conference, and when it was my turn to speak, there was applause. Little did I know, that half of the printouts were mishandled, with several of the pages in the wrong order. Not only that, but some of them had missing pages, while other ones had extra pages. The printing quality was, as promised, perfect, but they never bothered to bind it correctly!
To avoid mishaps like this 4 color printing debacle, it can be advantageous to bind your printouts yourself instead of ordering them bound for you. This can be offered by many 4 color printing companies, and they should give you a discount price. However, assembling all of those printouts will take forever, and the results won't look as professional.
Another alternative is to have them offer you a money-back guarantee that their printouts are all correctly assembled, well printed, and on time. Any company should be willing to stand behind their product like this, so if you can't get this money back guarantee or some other type of agreement, then you probably should not order your printouts from that company, but use someone else instead.
4 color printing is the name of the process, but in reality, it creates several thousand colors when its done. This is because it uses pixels, tiny dots of ink, in different combinations to fool the eye into thinking that there are many more colors than there actually are. This is the same way that newspapers and many magazines work, and is as good as the colors actually being there.
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