If you have purchased a costly printing machine, it is understandable that what stands on one of your top priorities is to minimize the printing costs as much as possible. For some of you who have been relying on an outside entity for your previous printing functions, this priority might come off as a little bit intimidating. However, worry not as we have prepared here guidelines to help you save on your use of printing machines.
To reduce the operation expenses of using your offset printing machine and be able to achieve that cheapest per-page cost as possible, here are our recommendations:
Use standard-sized pages.
Compared to using an odd-sized newsletter, opt to utilize standard-sized sheets such as letter or tabloid-sized. Odd-sized prints would force you to do the printing on an oversized sheet and cutting it out later, resulting in paper waste.
Therefore, sticking to standard-sized paper will help minimize paper waste and of course (especially in the long run), be able to significantly reduce your printing costs.
Don’t order better paper than you need.
Generally, for white papers, you pay for whiteness, coating, and thickness. Therefore, to reduce your printing costs you might want to know exactly for what purpose you will be using the paper.
For example, if your prints are mostly made out of texts and minimal graphics, you should choose uncoated paper. Also, for high-volume prints, you might want to consider staying away from the unnecessary use of coated papers.
Meanwhile, with that given, if you print lots of photos in different colors, you should on the other hand, not compromise the purchase of coated paper for the sake of saving printing costs.
Avoid bleeds.
Bleed in printing is described as having the ink go all the way towards the edge of the sheet. Therefore, there is no margin separating the image and edges—although this style is very attractive especially to photo prints, bleed design can be very costly. That’s because to make up with the lack of margin, oversized sheet size will be needed. Therefore, preventing this result in avoiding paper waste, hence cheaper printing costs.
Identify the specific quantity that is “really” needed for printing.
To do this, you should take a look at the history of usage (if you don’t have one, well, now you know you should start recording that information down). This is to help you find the exact quantity for printing that you need and avoid further paper waste.
Settle for quality paper but don’t overdo it.
In choosing the surface where you will do the printing, you should always ask yourself what the least expensive paper is that you can use which, still able to meet the quality of printing that you need.
In not skipping this consideration, you should see a significant change in your printing cost over time.
Ultimately, all of these tips point to one general rule. That is, for you to strive to make the production process as simple as possible. Therefore, you should always keep in mind to look out for any complicated production step included in your regular printing operation; remove it as soon as possible.