We’re expecting up to 2600 Groupon customers to come into East Coast Aero Club for ground school over the next calendar year. We’d like to avoid darkening the room and boring people to death with PowerPoint-style slides (illustration). That means a hand-out of about 10 pages, at least 70 percent color, that could be printed double-sided. So… now we’re talking about printing 2000+ copies (students should be able to take these course notes home with them). If done at Fedex/Kinko’s, this costs more than $5000. The latest generations of color laser printers don’t cost that much per page (Xerox claims down around 3 cents for some of theirs). So where to find a service bureau, ideally in the Boston area, that can take a PDF file and make us some stapled handouts at lower price than Kinko’s?
[I guess an alternative would be to have a traditional printer print this on a standard press, but we don’t want to print all 2600 copies at once because we may refine our ground school outline.]
You will say printing one page will cost 2,5 US-$ per copy? I can’t believe this number. Let’s see my MFC 9840 CDW costs around 700 US-$. It comes with 4 color cartridges. which should be enough for this 2000+ copies. So let’s assume a page paper A4 costs around
let’s say 1 ct/ . So the costs of it are 200 Dollar, then we need some currency. I’ve not idea how much my printer needs for 2000+ pages. but definitly not another 4000 US-$. So with that I’d come at or around 900 – 1000 US-$. And the printer will surely not be broken after just 2000 pages. So why not buy a somwhat robust printer. It will pay of just with this one printing job.
10 pages, both sides by 2000 copies is 40,000 pages in color. For $5k that’s $0.125 per page, only 4x the absolute lowest a manufacturer claims. The real minimum is probably at least $0.05. To have any kind of margin, the price can’t fall much below that $0.125.
Friedrich: It isn’t 2000 pages, it is 2000*5 pages of paper and 2000*10 pages of printing.
Brian: It isn’t 40,000 impressions, but 20,000 (10 pages * 2000; could be single- or double-sided to work out to 10,000 physical pieces of paper or 20,000).
I must have done a bad job explaining the specs!
Just going to the Staples web site and pricing the least expensive color laser printer that automatically prints both sides is (for 20K double sided pages):
Printer – $400
Toner – $2,760
Paper – $90
Total – $3,250
Why print it at all? Why not simply ask that the student bring a printed copy if they desire and provide blank paper for notes. It’s cheaper, saves trees, and further weeds out the serious from the joy riders.
David: Why print? If we don’t have a projector going with the figures on a screen the students need some way to see the figures. I don’t want to darken the room and put everyone to sleep. I want it to be an interactive session. But maybe having a stack of figures for people to refer to and then blank paper for notes is the way to go.
Instead of letter-sized (8.5×11) paper, print on tablet (17×11). The number of impressions will get cut in half but the cost per impression will not go up by 2x.
You can then turn your booklet into a real booklet: folded and stapled on the spine. Or, you can have them cut the tablet sheets in half and staple them afterwards.
If you don’t want to print all the booklets at once then FedEx Office’s price looks pretty good to me. If you called them for a custom quote, they probably gave you a discount on the assumption that you were printing them all at once.
A lot of color printers don’t have a stapler built into them like FedEx Office’s black & white printers do. So, they are may be charging you to hand-staple them. Perhaps you can do your own stapling
If you are going to change things frequently, why not print the number you need at the first class of each session?
You can buy a reasonably high lumen projector for the cost of a single print run.
Given:
* You expect to revise the notes.
* Each handout is ~5 sheets (printed both sides) of paper.
* Only a small(?) number of new students can be handled each day.
Why not just print out the notes on an ordinary color printer?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001R4C5BK
(Got one – works fine, though I paid a bit more than $120.)
Printing a day’s worth of handouts should not take long. (A non-issue if you run the print job the night before.) If you are worried about reliability, buy a spare. (Or two – at that price, why not?)
You would have to staple the handouts (or let the students do it).
Later, when you do not expect revisions, maybe then go to a bulk printing outfit.
Or not.
You provide the PDF of the ppt (or the ppt* itself) via email or web to the customers at least a few days before their session and ask them to print it and bring it to the session. (They could also bring their laptop with the file.)
No darkened room for them and no printing costs for you. You can then revise the ppt/PDF for each new session if you want.
* If you provide the ppt itself, they can print out the handout version if they want.
David Wihl: I know that a projector is cheap! But I want people to be interacting, looking at the instructor or another student answering a question, not looking at a screen. PowerPoint-style talks are the enemy!
David Freeman: I don’t want to ask people to print in advance. It seems like a burden. Also, what about last-minute attendees? I want them to be able to show up and just learn.
buy 15 ipads? 🙂
just kidding.
Maria Langer runs a helicopter charter service in Phoenix, Flying M Air. She’s using Magcloud for printing her promotional materials on demand. MagCloud runs at .20 per page. Create your PDF and upload it to MagCloud then order copies. MagCloud provides templates for various software packages to help with the layout (InDesign is worth learning). MagCloud occasionally runs promos with a 25% discount. MagCloud also let’s you publish the material so people can place an order for a copy. Maria even used MagCloud to create a promotional calendar of her photographs to distribute to her customers. I’ve been pleased with the print quality and the stapled binding.
http://magcloud.com/browse/Search?q=flying%20m
For color printing in your office I would suggest a Dell color laser printer. They have models which can print double sided pages with the duplex option. The cost of the Dell Color Lasers and their toner cartridges is reasonable.
Phil:
How many (finished) copies max would you want to print at any one time? 100?
I know you are looking for five pieces of paper, printed color on each side. Upper left hand corner staple?
Do you have a target price in mind for each finished piece, i.e. what would work for your business model?
(fyi I have a BIG Canon production printer, maybe I could do it for you.)
Print two 1/2 sized pages per side. (and duplex but you’re already doing that)
I do this with all my printouts of larger programs without problems.
In fact, I prefer it because I can view twice the content at once.
This may not be practical if there is lots of small stuff but with modern 1200 DPI printers the sharpness isn’t a problem.
(I’m also near-sighted and can actually read the small print better with my glasses off)
Print the entire thing ONCE in super-large format, and display it on an easel at the front of the room.
Possible options:
1. Agree with David Freeman: Email an online pdf version to be printed on students’ own color printers; last minute attendees can be handled ad-hoc on your own printer.
2. Print these in 4/c offset at a commercial shop in mexico or china or india
3. Change the format to one sheet of 11×17, 2 sides– the equivalent of 4 letter-size pages
and adapt your graphics to that format.
4. Print in B&W.