Ask HN: Cheap color copies for flyers?

3 points·endlessvoid94··5 comments

I need a quick way to get as many color copies of a flyer as possible. I'm on a college campus with a startup that will benefit from this, but paying $0.50 / copy at kinko's is unacceptable. Any tips?

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Getting Kinkos to run 1000s of color copies is like getting Pizza Hut to cater for a wedding. They can do it, but their limited capacity and selection can make it expensive and limited in scope.

Instead, find a regular printing company. They won't always be as easy to deal with as Kinkos (they might demand you supply press ready PDFs or the like) but they can quote you for pretty much any reasonable quantity going (any decent printer would be fine up to several thousand flyers with a few days turnaround) and give you a far better price (especially as the printing industry isn't doing so well right now).

For example, one of my clients here in the UK is a printer. They charge $267 for 1000 A4 (roughly letter size) color flyers. So 27 cents/copy but by my understanding printers in the US are way cheaper than here. If you wanted only A5 (or whatever the US equivalent is) size, cheaper too.

Thanks, I'll look into real printing companies. I've been trying to bum color prints from different folks and it just does not scale.

Search your area for a press company that does gang run printing. Might not be a good choice depending on your media size and layout, but it's often the cheapest thing going. In SF, I know a number of folks who use these guys: http://www.clubcardprinting.com/

Ask Kinko's how many flyers you need to print to qualify for bulk pricing.

i asked kinko's and they basically told me to do it myself, it would be cheaper. i was pretty surprised.

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