METHODS OF PRINTING

18 January, 2011 - 10:05 by Holy Trinity Barkingside
The lease on our in-house printer (Riso RZ200) is coming to an end and we are considering what other options are available to us at the present time and in the current economic climate. We need something for both the parish magazine and other church necessities. It would be interesting to learn what methods other churches use and are they satisfactory.
‹ Size of magazine What do you do? ›
Submitted by redglen on 18 January, 2011 - 11:14.
We use the printing facilities of another local church - our are part of a group of churches (of different denominations and none) who work together on outreach projects to our area, and one of the other churches are willing to allow others to use their priniting facilities - we pay them of course, but it's not as much as commercial rates. We have a small desk top type photocopier for our smaller printing needs. It means local churches can save on their overheads and foster good links with each other.
Submitted by Werburga on 21 January, 2011 - 00:21.
We use an excellent Christian printing company in Bolton, Lancs - Sharon Press. We send them our copy by post and it is returned by courier, printed, collated and stapled - their phone number is 01204 398776. We do have rather a large magazine though - 64 A5 pages and over 800 copies - much too many to produce in-house.
Submitted by Dragon on 31 January, 2011 - 00:32.
We also use Sharon Press in Bolton. Our copy is sent to them by email in pdf format and the finished magazine - 220 copies A5 28 page booklet - returned by courier.
Submitted by samrach on 19 June, 2012 - 00:19.
If you haven't got colour facilities and money is tight, you might consider getting pre-prints done. e.g. if your finished size is A5, a commercial printer, if printing at A2 size would be able to pre-print 4 colour cover shells in one go, then cut them down to A4, which you then overprint with your available facilities. Obviously you wouldn't necessarily run a picture, unless in the case of the church building, i.e. something that doesn't change month to month. Having it printed Offset Litho in process colours, you can achieve all sorts of colour permutations, even though only 4 colours are put on the sheet. If you have a light enough banner bar, you can overprint that quite well in black e.g. Date Also bear in mind difference between Litho and digital print: with Litho you pay to mount the plates and set the machine up. This applies whether you print 1 or 10000 copies. After that it's just a small cost for ink and paper per 100's/1000's of sheets. Digital print often involves a click charge, i.e. every time it prints a side of a sheet it would perhaps cost 10p, so 1 sheet A4 printed both sides in colour 2x10p & paper. So unless you have a very small run it quickly starts costing exponentially more and more