Print Quality & Why You Should Care
For the average person, print jobs are mostly university assignments, resumes, and job applications. Those and most other everyday needs are not graphic-heavy or expensive to print, so it doesn’t make sense to get most things professionally printed anymore. As technology advances, budget printers have become increasingly satisfactory in both quality and price point.
However, business owners are not the most people. They have photo menus to print, laminate, and update frequently. They also may need things a home printer simply can’t handle size-wise such as banners, signs, and lettering. There is also the issue of quality. Everyone knows home printers can be fickle. Color differences, strange patterns, and simple malfunctions make it an unreliable and frustrating way to print for your business needs.
Menu printing is essential to looking professional to customers. Ink stains, poor legibility, and no feasible way to incorporate graphics can tend to make a home-printed menu feel rushed. All of these things can generally be avoided if printing with a professional print shop. Commonly business owners feel this service may be too expensive or simply not worth the effort. Quite the contrary, it is essential to making more profit, and a better business image.
“Once placed in the guest’s hand, it can directly influence not only what they will order, but ultimately how much they will spend. Using forecasted cover counts and average check targets, the menu design and print quality directly influences sales revenue.”
— AbsoluteColor
According to CameraJabber, a publication for photographers, one of the most common mistakes people make before using a professional printer for the first time is color management. Most people don’t think about lighting and screen-to-paper differences between colors in home printing jobs; either it comes out right or it doesn’t. Mistakes like this can be avoided by working with a professional. They know what will and won’t look right on paper, and have printers that can handle deep rich colors without any bleeding.
Nobody on earth ever ordered a print job where fast delivery wasn’t preferred over a slow lagging turnaround. Businesses need quick service. You would think printing at home would be faster, and while technically it can be in small batches, imagine you took just one print to a printer, and they could print 250 perfect copies in 60 seconds. Instead of you loading up paper, setting up to print, and making sure each one comes out and prints just right, they have industrial machines to take care of this for them and can do it at a very fast speed while maintaining quality. As said before, time is a valuable commodity to a business owner, you and your team have better things to do than sit around a company copying machine.
According to KinTech, a printing company, they often find their cost may be less to businesses. Once you factor in all of the color inks, the printer itself, toner, and high-quality paper, bulk menus yourself can run you over $500. Most print professionals can afford to charge less than this because of their mass production ability.
With costs being too high, and too long of a turnaround time debunked, all that is left is the quality concerns. Many business owners like to do everything themselves to ensure quality. They have the business vision, they know what things should look and perform like at all times. There are hundreds of places that you can get prints from both online and locally. We like to print locally with high-quality supplies that business owners can trust. As you can see here, our menus come out colorful and high quality. We work with the client on multiple rounds of revisions to make sure everything is right the first time. We have copywriters, design teams, and media experts to make recommendations and fixes.