Design the printing company you always wanted to do business with.

[RobinGraham]

Hi everyone! Thanks in advance for your feedback.

My name is Robin, I recently purchased a large format photo printer. It will print up to 44" wide on photo paper. It is really an amazing printer. I am currently a special effects professional, but I was a photographer for years. I wanted to start a small side business selling large format photo prints. I figured with my low overheads and computer graphics expertise I could really offer a excellent product for a really affordable price.

Anyway. Sales talk aside I would love to hear what is important to you, the small business photographer. You really have the opportunity to create the business you always wanted to work with.

* What image formats do you normally work in?
* What sizes do you typically print in?
* What kind of paper?
* What is the most important aspect in a printing company that you work with? Speed? Price? Professional website? Return policy?

Please help me out with any feedback you can. This could be a amazing business for my family. I am not looking for any kind of huge operation, just a niche busniess that provides the best quality.

 

[ColeGauthier]

Not to kill your dreams or anything but why would you want to poor thousands of dollars into this when there is plenty of labs that this already?

 

[RobinGraham]

My wife is a fashion designer. The printer was for her (printing out huge patterns). But she really wont be using the printer as much as it should be used. And like you said, it does cost thousands of dollars we should be getting something more out of it!

Besides, I looked around online and the prices from the professional places are pretty high. I can compete absolutely with quality, and I can kill them on price. And anyway, it could be a good small side business to help with the bills. In order to do this correctly I need to find out exactly what people want out of a printing service.

 

[Ryan L]

1st I want quality, but 2nd I want variety. I want prints on metal, canvas, acrylic, matted, etc., 3rd is speed for me.

 

[ColeGauthier]

I will give you some feedback as to what I look for when buying prints.
-Provide quality along with a good variety, just like what the above post mentioned. This could become a big business and if you do shipping, you need to make sure you can provide the speed to customer and make sure it does not cost an in the leg for the shipping costs, especially for a guy like lets say, in Canada. Make you provide excellent customer service and you are guaranteed to have returning customers. I usually print the popular sizes, 5X7's, 8X10's, 11X14's ect.. but make you can do big prints as well 30X40 and bigger because that's what seems to be what photographers are wanting to show off in their studios. That's just my opinion. Oh and by the way, if ever you do shipping to Canada, I might be interested! Good luck with all of this!

 

[Bitter Jeweler]

Will you be purchasing a second printer, in case one goes down so you can still deliver product?

 

[Helen B]

I presume that you are talking about inkjet prints.

I'd be looking for:

Information on which printer and inks are being used, so that I can find relevant longevity testing information;
An accurately set up and profiled printer (no canned profiles), especially in the neutrals, with the profiles available online.
Decent choice of high quality papers in both gloss and matt, particularly the papers that have good results with your printer and inks in longevity testing;
Availability of sample prints, possibly for a small charge;
An FTP site that will accept very large files, with prior arrangement;
Acceptance of files in any colour space, not just sRGB; and
Never being sent a print that has printing flaws.


I would also be interested in companies that offered some uncommon services:

Overcoating with protective and/or gloss coats; and
Production of digital negatives tailored to specific printing processes.


Those thoughts are based on the printing services I used to provide, but only up to 17" wide. I was simply providing the service I wanted myself.

To answer your questions:
* What image formats do you normally work in? Not sure what you mean in this context. I use everything between little P&S cameras to 8x10, but I don't know what that has to do with printing. I usually send files to a printer in Adobe RGB. The file sizes can be very large, and I send them at a native ppi of the printer. I do not want the printing company to alter the file in any way.
* What sizes do you typically print in? Between about 13 x 19 up to 32 x 40. I usually print up to 17" wide myself, but might drop down to a 13" printer and get more printing done by others, especially if their quality/price ratio was high.
* What kind of paper? Mostly rag, archival papers, glossy and matte.
* What is the most important aspect in a printing company that you work with? Speed? Price? Professional website? Return policy? No-questions return, but I wouldn't expect to have to return a print. Intelligent customer service - it's nice to know that the person you are talking to actually knows what they are talking about. Good website with plenty of useful information that is easily found. Reliable delivery time estimates (doesn't always have to be fast, does have to be reliable.)

 

[RobinGraham]

ColeGauthier: Thanks for the feedback! I want to focus on just the large prints. There is more money to be made in the large prints, and it is more specialized. Not many people have these huge printers. Yea I would totally ship to Canada, no reason not to! I would ship everything in the large tubes via US postal service. I don't think I want to get into framing and whatnot. I would much rather just refer people to other sites where they can get a frame much cheaper than I could do. I think to keep overhead low I can't offer ALL the different types of media, probably only 2 or maybe 3 kinds. What do you think are the most popular? Photo matte, and photo glossy maybe?


Bitter Jeweler: Good question, and I have a bad answer: No. Right now we literally don't have enough room for another printer. I think we will just have to limit how much business we can take. So if the printer breaks we would just have to shut down the business until it is fixed. A little annoying for the customer, I know. But for the 2 or 3 people that would be affected by the broken printer I can just give a refund, or eat some of the cost and get it printed for them down the street at another professional place so they still get their product.

Helen B: Thank you so much for the long answer! This is so useful to me! I have some questions for you.
* I am getting the spyder4 Elite. It has a monitor and printer calibrator. Would this be good enough to ensure the printer is properly calibrated? I figured I would calibrate to sRGB, is this not the best way to do things?
* I also want to make sure I have the best combination of ink and paper. Do you know where I can find these longevity tests?
* Sure, a sample print sounds like a great idea. I also wanted to include a proof for free with each large print. basically I wanted to make a proof that had 6-8 versions of the photo with different gamma/exposure/saturation settings. So then people can respond to which one they liked best. Then if someone doesn't have the perfect setup at home they could set get a print that matches what they want to see.
* Sure, ftp is good. But what about a web based service? Some people might not understand ftp. It would be great to have a web based service that accepted files of any size.
* Ok I will look into different colorspaces. It make make it easier on us (and more reliable) to just do sRGB at first. Is that a dealbreaker?

 

[KmH]

Tubes suck.

Quality prints get shipped flat, not rolled.

 

[RobinGraham]

Ok good to know. I suppose I could offer flat shipping for a extra fee.

 

[Carny]

What printer do you have? How does it compare to the bigger commercial sites use, say mpix for example?

 

[RobinGraham]

I have a Canon ipf820

I am not sure how it compares to mpix, but I have seen them at professional printers before. They are for large format printing, and that is what I want to specialize in. They print up to 44inches wide and 100 feet long and 2400x1200 dpi. That is pretty amazing!

 

[KmH]

Ok good to know. I suppose I could offer flat shipping for a extra fee.

I don't have to pay extra for flat shipping, because the labs I use labs don't ship anything in tubes.

In fact some of the labs I use don't charge for regular shipping, though I understand the shipping charge is built into their pricing.

So, a typical 20x30 print has it's corners taped (drawing masking tape) to a 28" x 34" sheet of of cardboard. Then a thin sheet of non-abrasive foam is placed over the print side of the paper. All of that goes into a sturdy clear plastic bag which is taped sealed with clear tape. That all goes into the cardboard shipping box.

DPI and PPI are not the same thing. DPI is a measure of output device resolution, and PPI is a measure of input device resolution.

So a printer that can print at 2400 dpi can print at 2400 dpi in both width and length.

 

[Helen B]

The iPF820 might not be considered as a high-end photo printer by everyone: it only uses 5 inks, and it uses dyes rather than pigments for C, M, Y and glossy K (the matte K is pigment). The two main sources of longevity testing data are Wilhelm Research and Aardenburg Imaging. Aardenburg has no data on the iPF820 and I couldn't see anything on the Wilhelm site either. You could send samples to Aardenburg for testing if you wished.

I have no experience with the Spyder 4. I use an i1 Pro and will soon upgrade to the i1 Pro2, which is what I would recommend now for semi-automatic target reading. I suggest that you look at i1/Spyder 4 comparisons to see which is best for you. Printers are not usually 'calibrated to sRGB'. The profile covers their native colour space which is very unlikely to correspond with sRGB.

I think that Mpix uses digital C-print processes - ie light-sensitive paper exposed by lasers - rather than inkjets for their prints. I think they use Epson inkjets for the canvas gallery wraps.

 

[RobinGraham]

You are right about the 5 ink system. I think it would be better for me to focus on large format poster prints, but not nessicarily the high end market. I know this printer will make geogous prints, but it probably wouldn\t hold up to a professional photographers scruteny.