Wife makes cards – just about to ping PDF to printer to find out they’re off til arse end of Jan! Need high-quality, small volume and quick turnaround online-based printer ASAP…any recommendations folks?

We use Manchester printers. Very easy to use and excellent value.

Why do they need to be online based? This is the printer I use for all my cards. They’re in Tod. Been using them for years

Creative

They’re excellent! Always do a top notch job on short run cards. Really good on price and a quick turnaround. And they’re just great people to deal with. Just give them a shout, send them your files and they’ll post them out to you

Moo have always been good for me, but you can’t beat a good independent like binners recommends if they can compete with the online big guns on price…

We’ve got accounts with a couple of the bigger online print houses but tend to be better for bigger runs. If it were me… if grab the recommendation from Binners and run with it!

Proper, small local print companies are brilliant for the small batch, top end stuff you’re after. The likes of Moo and VistaPrint are a bit hit and miss quality and finish wise.

Happy to get a price if you need one though, just let me know quantities / sizes etc. No sweat,

On this subject has anyone found a printer that can do greetings cards with white borders, preferably gloss/fine art style print (for landscape photographs) on a matte card base? I have seen what I want in shops but they are from big commercial companies.

Bee Creatinve Print based in Salford

http://www.beecreativeprint.co.uk

On this subject has anyone found a printer that can do greetings cards with white borders, preferably gloss/fine art style print (for landscape photographs) on a matte card base?

tlr – the guys I linked to above can sort that out for you

Like James, I’ve found online places to be very hit and miss. The last job I had done – 2000 swing tickets on heavy board, drilled – had been finished about 5 degrees out of reg! All dumped straight into the recycling bin, and I went to my usual printers and got the job done properly

If you must do ‘online’ then Printing.com are a good halfway house as they are physical places you can go in and have a chat with, then the work is then produced at a central national printers. Good for stuff like flyers and leaflets that you just bang out.

But for higher end stuff, go and see your local independent printers every time. The guys I use will have stock samples that you can go through, and are happy to run off test prints. I do a lot of large wide-format prints of my illustrations, and when I started doing them we tried a number of different stocks, until we settled on the right one. It wasn’t the one I expected, and it wasn’t the most expensive, but it was the one that best suited my work. You can’t do that online.

We now have a great long-established relationship, so they’re pro-active. They’ll contact me and say they’ve got new stock in that I might want to try etc

Like most things in life, theres no substitute for sitting down with someone who knows what they’re talking about, and getting a bespoke service.

Also, like a lot of things in life, people automatically assume that thats going to be more expensive than an online service. In my experience that isn’t necessarily the case. And when it is, the additional level of service is more than worth the fairly negligible cost difference

I’ll second Binners’ suggestion. I used Creative for some booklets a while back, and they were excellent. The quality was very good and the turn-around short, but they were incredibly accommodating.

I’ll just leave this here http://www.theharriergroup.com/commercial-print.ashx – I might be biased though 😉

Thanks Binners, I’ll speak to them. Their website doesn’t seem to suggest that they do that sort of thing.

They’re mainly a design agency. A good one too. They just happen to have some pretty state of the art digital printing kit, and would rather it was getting used as much as possible.

The print quality on the digital wide format stuff they do for me looks almost like a silk screen job