Our Printing Quality
A lot of people ask us for the kind of quality they can expect, especially from the black and white newspapers. Below we explain the printing process and how it affects the quality, as well as show you some samples of what you might expect.
The quick answer is fairly simple: if you’ve got requirements for high quality, you should be printing in colour.
Black & White
Our black and white press is effectively a huge, very fast, laser printer. In layman’s terms it fuses toner (the inky black stuff) to paper with a laser. The toner sticks to the areas that the printer has charged with the laser, and doesn’t to the rest.
This results in black text and lines that appear sharp and crisp. To print greys the printer uses a dithering process — it uses small dots of black in varying amounts to make the image appear shades of grey from a distance.
If there’s too much toner on a page, the paper becomes statically charged which causes problems with the machine. Large dark areas can cause this, and in those situations the amount of toner applied to the page has to be reduced. If this occurs the black won’t be as rich or deep. To mitigate this try and avoid large dark areas in your newspaper.
We don’t mean to worry you — black and white newspapers can look great. One of our customers made a newspaper for his wedding, and here are some closeups which might give you an idea of the kind of quality you can expect. Just click to zoom in.
Find out more about designing a black & white newspaper.
And here’s the front cover of The Postcode Paper. Again, click on the image to view large.
And a full width centre spread:
Colour
Our colour press is the same that any tabloid uses. The best thing to do for a sample is to grab a paper like The Sun or The Mirror and take a close look at that.
For example here’s 8, a newspaper we made for the BBC:
And Andy Smith’s illustrations:
Find out more about designing a colour newspaper.