Back in the day … so to speak … colour printing was expensive. More expensive than grayscale or mono printing, and more again than “spot colour” printing using 1 or 2 or 3 Pantone ink colours.
Nowadays, that has changed for some operators.
In our case, our traditional offset/commercial trade print partners work in CMYK all the time. That’s basically all they do.
So for these partners, CMYK is the best priced option. They have these inks on the press all the time, and if they have to swap over to spot Pantone colours, it slows everything down, adds big costs and they don’t really like printing that kind of job.
Others are a bit more flexible, but aside from single colour (either mono/grayscale or 1 Pantone colour), in their price book, CMYK is the second cheapest option.
Again, that’s because their equipment is so used to CMYK it runs it all the time.
That means less costs in producing full colour work, which they pass on (trade printing can be very price-pressured!).
So while in the old days full colour (CMYK — also called four colour process printing) was the most expensive, for many jobs, it isn’t anymore.
You’d be surprised just how little difference there is between grayscale and colour.
In the digital world, colour isn’t as expensive either as some providers would like you to think.
Depending on their cost structure, colour is very affordable, which is why we can save 77% (and sometimes more) on digital colour printing.
When you look at their pricing, colour can be 8-times more per side than mono! It’s a pity they don’t reveal the real dollar cost differences they have, as you’d probably be rather surprised.
Anyway, that leaves room for agile, low-overhead providers like us to really help you save on your printing, especially some big savings on digital printing versus what we think are lazy competitors.
Once you know this — it really shatters the old myths about colour printing being so much more expensive!