We live in the age of “Do-it-yourself,” and the Internet is one of the main reasons for this. Whether it’s home renovation, car repair or gourmet cooking, there is a plethora of detailed instructional material out there to help you achieve success. Of course, that doesn’t mean that DIY results will always match professional results, especially in areas where a lot of technical skill is required. Once you get the hang of things, however, you can hone your skills in any area.
Technology is also a big reason why DIY is becoming so prevalent, and printing projects are a perfect example. It used to be that if you need a stack of papers printers – to help find a lost dog, for example – you would go straight to the printers. That was before the personal computing revolution.
However, even when PCs became commonplace and printers became more prevalent, the results were too primitive-looking in many cases. Professional projects certainly needed to be handled by a trained printing specialist with the right equipment.
But as time went on, printers became more and more sophisticated. The price point got lower, and the quality got better. This is great for a lot of reasons, especially the capability to easily and cheaply scan documents and share them digitally. These days, you don’t even have to plug anything into your printer – everything moves through the airwaves via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
You might have thought that DIY printers would have made professional printing obsolete by now, but no such thing has happened. That’s because a vast array of printing projects are still impractical for home reasons.
1. Quality
The main difference between professional and DIY jobs is still quality. That means everything from the vividness of the pages to color matching. It means trimming, folding, brightness, and the overall quality of the pages. If you were to try and mimic these results on a home printer, you would be hard-pressed – and you would also go through a ton of expensive ink cartridges!
2. Bleed
A huge number of printing projects, professional and otherwise, need to be printed to the edge of the page. A good professional printer achieves this by actually printing on a slightly larger piece of paper, then using precision machines to trim off the “bleed” and create perfect edges. Trying to mimic this at home, especially on a large scale, can truly be a mess.
3. Efficiency
If you need several hundred pages (especially if they’re color), it makes a huge amount of sense to skip the DIY approach and take your project to a professional printer. Because they have systems in place that allow them to deliver professional results, they’re able to work in a predictable and organized ways to make your project successful.
Professional printing will always be worth it
There are projects that make sense to do at home – the small ones, the more informal ones – but professional printing continues to return a higher standard of quality that makes a big difference for more important projects.