Best Brochure Printer?

[OriginalTouch]

What is the best route for a colour printer for professional glossy brochures?

Options:

Dye Sublimination? Supposed to be good but expensive.
Laser? Is it the best quality?
Printing Company? But don't want 1000s of prints done for a high setup cost.

Really wanted a brochure that we could change for different mailshots, and as new stock is added so a big print-run is no good. But need it really professional, not home-made looking.

Since getting www.originaltouch.co.uk off the ground with Actinic this week, have had 4 requests this morning for a brochure of vegetable seeds!

[leehack]

Best printer available is on this page.

[OriginalTouch]

LOL - should have seen that plug coming!

Got an HP Colour Laser at the moment.

Question's more about people's experience about brochure printing in general and whether in-house can really look that professional.

Binding, type of paper etc

Comparisons in-house versus professional printing versus even Prontaprint types?

[Donna Kempster]

You don't necessarily need huge print runs to print a brochure via a printer - if the brochure has a reasonable pagination the volumes can be quite low.

The choices are:

Weboffset printer - depending on your volumes you can go to a mini web printer which gives good quality and good prices otherwise you'll need a sheet fed print.

Digital printer - much lower runs and you can change artwork to suit and looks more professional than printing in house. A web search will give you loads of them. But beware some do not have the best kit in the world! We use a local firm to us called offsitedigital and they have produced small runs for us very effectively, but we also nearly got our fingers burnt by another company so get a proof first.

My advise would be to find a couple of local digital printers and get small runs to start with to see if the cat. req's from the website actually convert to sales before printing loads!

Donna

[OriginalTouch]

These 'digital printers' - are they the same process that shops like Staples use?

[Donna Kempster]

Em - not sure. I wouldn't be the place I would go to have brochures printed so wouldn't know what they could do.

Past life (proper job) bought a lot of large run brochure print using web and mini web printers. When we started up on our own we spoke to our old printers and some of the mini web guys could get the small runs we needed for a fair price but when they couldn't they suggested local digital printers that could. Their advice was choose one local to you so you can go and see their set up.

IMO as long as the images you have are high res. and the artwork is output in the correct format a digital print job will look good enough. Also if you are not in a rush to get work done their are sheet fed printers that will plan your job up with another company to get the run lengths longer and give you a good price. There is a good one based in Wales but I can't find their details at the moment. A supplier of ours uses them so if I find it i'll post it here.

Sorry.
D