Hi everybody, and thank you to Color Printing Forum for gathering all these infos in one place.

We are a group of journalists, and every two weeks we print a magazine for tourists visiting Mexico:

- Size: 11 x 17
- Pages: 32 (16 colors)
- Copies: 2,000

We pay a commercial offset printer to do the job. We pay them $ 1,200 per run (that is 60 cents x 2.000 copies = $ 1,200). Their printing quality is not so good, though... and their printing press cannot handle more than 16 color pages out of 32.

So, we are looking to improve printing quality but without going broke. Our question is: Would it make sense acquiring a couple of fast color printers (MFP) with finishing options and try to do the printing ourselves?

We would really appreciate any advice from some expert in the field because we are really confused with the many options in the market (and digital presses seem way too expensive).

Thank you in advance for your help.

With a quantity of 1,000 we find digital printing to fit our budget well, but with a quantity of 2,000 I think you are better off printing via offset or DI offset.

As you say the big digital presses are costly. If you went with a pair of samller copiers/multifunction machines you're looking at a minimum of $800/month in lease payments for the machines, and likely more to get lower click charges. Then you're looking at click charges of 7 to 16 cents per color sheet depending on the quality of print you can settle for balancing print quality with economic operation. (and assuming you're going to have some coverage with a tourist magazine vs. text type printing, you would pay noticably more if you bought your own consumables and durables retail.)

(I just realized you posted this in the imagepress forum -- with that budget you won't get close to a 7000 which would be the speed that would make it easy; even a pair of C1s would cost more than that print budget just for the machines themselves here in the US)

Your post finally sheds some light on the subject, as we don't want to do any costly mistakes. Thank you also for pointing out the costs of consumables and durables in the equation.

As we said in the other post - the printing quality (offset) we now have is not so good. Some of our advertisers are not happy with the look of their ads, so sooner or later (better sooner!) we have to improve overall printing quality through digital printing. Quality is what advertisers are demanding us.

We might also consider reducing the size from 11 x 17 to 8.5 x 11, if that would drive costs down (lower click charges, as you said). In that case, would MFPs make any sense? By the way, our magazine has about a 50/50 ratio images-text.

Well, Jeff, have a great day and thank you very much from Playa del Carmen, Mexico!

Stan, Vito, Julieta

Any other thoughts/advises on the subject are always welcome.