Thankfully, the days of running down to a quick-copy center like Kinko’s at the last minute are finally over.
These days, the latest printer technologies mean that you can print your materials at your leisure in your home or office and not have to schedule your end-of-day work activities around getting the finished files and documents printed at an off-site location. In fact, the advent of affordable on-demand printers and high quality, laser printer toner has almost completely eliminated the need for copy shops.
Simply put, reliable and cost-effective home-based printing is now a fact of life, though that wasn’t always the case. While it is still more affordable to get very long-run jobs produced by a commercial printer or copy house, any print job up to 5,000 copies can now be run far more conveniently and just as affordably in your own work space.
Consider a typical job that was once brought to a copy shop for fulfillment. In this particular case, it is 50 stapled sets of 50 pages, double-sided with a colored cover sheet. In the past, to produce the job in-house would require a copier and a staffer and take several hours to complete.
The staffer would have to print the copies on both sides, collate them by hand, add the cover sheet and then manually staple the entire package. In addition to the time required, there was a significant degree of risk that not all of the packages would be prepared properly.
Innovations introduced into the printer market over the last decade have all but eliminated these inconveniences and problems. Modern printers have multiple paper trays that can insert differently colored sheets, collate sets as they are made and an in-line stapler to complete the project without any human intervention whatsoever.
Even more remarkably, the materials used in the average printing project have gotten even better. Paper is sturdier and more affordable and laser printer toner delivers darker, consistent blacks and more vibrant colors than ever before. While copier inks and laser printer toner are the most expensive component in a home-cased printing project, there are ways to significantly reduce the cost.
It is a widely acknowledged “secret” that most printer manufacturers sell their equipment at close to the actual cost of manufacture and then plan to make their profit by selling the ink or laser printer toner at an exorbitant price.
Fortunately, for the home-based printer, a number of companies have stepped in with their own brands of high-quality toner and ink. This fact allows consumers to have their cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, they can buy the best laser printers on the market and, on the other, they can then use affordable, high quality ink to print their projects.
As you can see, the home-based printing has evolved to a significant degree over the past ten years. One need not depend on outside printers to produce all but the largest print jobs.