Ask the cubicle expat: Affordable printers

March 28th, 2007

Beth writes: “You gave me one of the promo postcards you had printed up for the book. I was wondering who you had them printed by? I’ll be looking for a printer in the next couple of weeks and I don’t have a vendor yet…”

I am a huge fan of the infinitely cheap (without looking like it) VistaPrint. While I’ve never had them print postcards for me (the book postcards came from my publisher), they’ve done a great job on my business cards year after year. But here are a couple of other options, courtesy of Rachel Kramer Bussel, who recently researched the lowest postcard-printing rates for her own purposes and blogged about her findings:

• 1-800-POSTCARDS: 5,000 postcards for $250 (!)
• PrintRunner: 5,000 postcards for around $170 (!)

And after doing some more research for other printing prices, Beth sent me another messaging letting me know, “FYI, the best [U.S.] vendor for regular 8.5 x 11 color copies I’ve found is National Color Copy in Florida. Even with shipping it ends up a lot cheaper than Kinko’s if you are printing in bulk.”

Thanks, Beth. Good to know. And I have to agree — Kinko’s is anything but cheap. For example, I wanted to print out my book manuscript to proofread it this summer and my printer was on the fritz. Kinko’s couldn’t give me anything better than a $1/page. At 250 pages, that was way too steep for this girl.

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