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Poster Printing
With posters from A4 to A0+ 1ClickPrint covers the full range at great prices. Full colour A2 posters from 10p each inc VAT and delivery. Most poster sizes have a minimum order value of 1 and are high enough quality to be used for poster and fine art poster printing.
Poster printing is available using a range of methods with each one more having particular strengths and weaknesses. Our most popular method of poster printing for large format printing (A2+) is digital large format inkjet printing. For this a large or wide format inkjet printer feeds paper from a large roll and can be set to automatically cut each poster after printing. These large format inkjet printers are capable of printing onto a massive array of papers, films and canvases. They excel at photographic, full colour and fine art poster printing and as it is a digital technology there is no physical set up costs such as printing plates. The print quality from a large format inkjet printer is vibrant, bold and with appropriate calibration the colour matching can be excellent due to the wide array of inks that the printer can use to mix the colours. It's common place for a modern large format printer to have 12 different coloured inks compared to the 4 commonly used in a litho press. Perhaps the only real draw back with a digital large format printer is the speed and cost of production. At medium to large volumes a litho press can be an order of magnitude cheaper and faster to run.
Litho printing uses a traditional printing press to produce colour prints by overlaying cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) prints. The prints produced are bold and vibrant and pantone colours can be applied and an extra print. These printing presses can produce high volumes of print at a relatively low price and at an impressive speed. The main draw back is that each colour ink requires a physical printing plate to be produced at a significant cost. That means that litho presses are unable to economically produce small quantities of prints. In addition to this presses that are large enough to print A0 posters are very rare and presses able to print larger than that are pretty much unheard of. Whilst litho presses are capable of fantastic print quality they are stronger in some areas than others. Poster printing with large areas of solid colour usually look better when printed on a litho press however as litho presses mix colours form a palate of only 4 primary colours they struggle to produce the same richness and sharpness that a good large format inkjet printer can produce on a full colour image. Litho presses can produce poster printing containing an exact pantone colour but it would mean adding another print head or not allowing a full range of other colours in the print. By default most poster printing companies print their posters using process printing and so colours will suffer from a little wandering during the print run.
The remaining major print process is another digital print process but this time using a large laser printer to produce the posters. In terms of speed and cost this is a good halfway house between inkjet printing and litho printing but in quality terms it can lag behind them both slightly. Laser printers run on a similar basis to litho printers in that the colour is made out of 4 colour print being overlaid on each other (CMYK). As the poster paper moves through the printer each colour is applied to it in turn. On a litho press a skilled operator carefully checks and adjusts the print to ensure that the colours lay exactly on top of each other. This is called the register and in a laser printer this has to be done automatically. Unfortunately laser printers can't generally match the trained human eye and so whilst razor sharp on single colour prints they tend to blur on full colour prints. This become more evident on very small text however general isn't too much of an issue on the large designs of poster printing. Laser printers can also struggle on large blocks of solid and light colours as any imperfections on the imaging drum become more obvious and so as uneveness in the print. Most laser presses have a maximum print size of SRA3 which is slightly bigger than a A3 sheet. This is normally fine for most mid volume poster printing.
Poster printing usually goes hand in hand with a couple of laminated finish style. In addition to the obvious not laminated finish there is also either laminated or encapsulated. The difference in minor but the applications are quite different. A laminated poster is trimmed to the edge of the poster where as an encapsulated poster has a border of lamination around the actual print itself. This border of laminated provides a tough waterproof seal that is difficult to pick apart. That makes it perfect for anything that is expected to be exposed to liquids or handled repeatedly. An example would be a table menu in a cafe. Generally customers go for lamination for posters and encapsulation for exterior poster of menus.
