Printing business supplies?

Hello everyone, I am new to this forum as well as professional printing. I am looking to purchase supplies to make "Hallmark quality" greeting cards, but dont know where to start. I started on tiger direct, looking for a laser printer that had the capability to print heavy card stock, this is about as far as I got before I decided to seek more experienced help. What kind of equipment would I need to look into to do this sort of printing? Price is of great concern as I'm only 19 years old. I'm really looking for more information on where to start. I have been surfing the forum a little, but im not sure where to look. I would really like to learn more about this subject so a starting point, not a spoon feeding would be awesome. Thanks

 

There's a fairly large gap between specialty / art / custom / one-off cards and production cards of any quantity.

Friends who are photographers print using their inkjets of various sizes and prescored cards from redriver (http://www.redrivercatalog.com/) The 8- to 12- color inkjets print great on these coated inkjet cards and it's easy no-fuss and no finishing work or equipment, but somewhat time consuming due to the slow inkjet speed and both the ink and coated prescored cardstock are expensive.

With a laser you need one robust enough to feed heavy stock smoothly so you don't get halftone jitter due to the heavy stock, and then you need a scorer / folder to score the cards for a decent fold which you might pickup for $1000 to $1500 used.

If you really wanted to get into this a letterpress would come into play at some point to emboss.

 

I do like the low operating costs of the laser printer. Would I be able to make professional quality prints with a decent laser printer, good enough to market and sell? I have a pretty unique idea of a product/service I believe there is a market for but no companies are currently doing this. I do plan on starting a business, obviously with help from my parents, so what is the best/easiest/cheapest way to get started? And what is the purpose of a folding machine? Does It do something I cannot with my hands or a ruler?

 

It depends on the content. One artist I know is extremely successful selling prints run on a high-end laser -- these are very graphic in quality, bright mixed media paintings with bright paint and ink, detailed linework, etc. They look great - bold, vivid, and clear.

But for more continuous tone, photographic content, you won't quite reach "hallmark" quality or what an artist can run (at a cost 10x to 15x as great) on an 8- or 12- color inkjet.

If you print on 80lb cover or 100lb cover and fold by hand, you'll get an uneven edge. If you bleed the output so there is toner on the fold, it may crack as well. To fold cardstock nicely you need to score the inside with a blunt knife and then fold. If you are only doing a couple hundred cards you can create a jig to hold a rule to score, but if you're doing more than that it gets laborious in a hurry!

 

High quality greeting cards

There is an interesting approach I can suggest. You could use an inkjet printer with glossy photo paper to print exceptional quality color photos of various sizes. But you need to attach continuous ink supply system to it (CISS). I'm currently using this method with my Epson & I smoothly printed several hundred Christmas cards the other day!

 

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. It's that time of the year again, and orders for one-off Christmas greeting cards are coming in again.

These suggestions really help. Now I just have to experiment here.

 

Currently, I would say that inkjet is the quality option for this sort of thing but the costs must be astronomical and the process must be very slow. An Intec CP2020 can print on 500gsm board and do all sorts of other things too that might be handy. They're at the lower end of the digital printing machinery price bracket, but they're still not cheap. Image quality is the best I've seen from ANY laser printer though (provided you experiment with paper types and machine settings). Sometimes it's hard for me to tell which sheet is offset litho and which sheet was printed on an Intec, and I've been mucking about in this trade for over 20 years.