Using the right technologies while printing your business cards is important in order to control the quality and expenses; sometimes people select a business card printing agency based on its quote but this is not the most effective approach. There are two major printing technologies used in business card printing; offset printing and digital printing. Both of these methods have different cost and quality standards. Let’s talk about them in details.
Offset Printing
Offset printing is an older yet the most popular business card printing method that is being used all over the world. This particular method offers lots of advantages over its counterparts; first of all, it delivers great printing quality that usually depends on the quality of ink and rubber sheet. It prints crisp lines and fonts because the designed is transferred to a rubber sheet in the first step and that sheet is pressed against paper to transfer the design.
This method is quite similar to stamping and it is way faster than printing via other methods. Interestingly, offset printing is a popular printing method in Singapore as it becomes dramatically cheap when you order larger quantities. The majority of the printing cost goes to designing that plate and rubber sheet used in pressing process. So, whether you order 100 cards or 10,000 cards, the printing company has to develop plate and rubber sheet once. On the other hand, this method would be very expensive if you order less than 200 business cards.
Digital Printing
Digital printing for business cards uses the same technologies used in computer printers. Now, because of the technological advancements, digital printing yields amazingly highly quality results. An inexperienced person cannot tell the different between an offset printing job and digital printing job. So you don’t have to worry about the quality difference between these two technologies. However, the price factor makes lots of difference.
Business cards printed via digital printing have a constant price; it means, whether you order 100 business cards or 10,000 cards, the per business card cost would remain the same. And these cards are significantly expensive than cards printed via offset printing method. So, if you want more than 200 business cards, using digital printing would not be a good choice as it would be expensive.
Hybrid Printing Technologies
Hybrid printing technologies are relatively newer in the industry but you can find many printing service providers using such methods. As companies cannot ditch offset printing methods overnight in favor of digital printing, hybrid technologies come in handy as they integrate digital and offset methods to get the benefits of both.
In such printing methods, computerized plates are used for offset printing and because of the digital aid, more complex designs and images and logos could be printed via offset method because of its economical factor. Hybrid printing technologies are cheaper than digital printing and can handle more complex jobs as compared to offset printing.