Postcards, a new world

From WiredPRNews:

Columbine Label Company, Inc. has expanded its label printing options for customers with a HP Indigo WS4500 Digital Press. The custom printing label producer hired four new employees who specialize in running, managing and supporting the equipment, an almost 30 percent increase in company growth.

Columbine Label is one of only three printing companies in Colorado to own an HP Indigo WS4500 Digital custom label press and the only one with traditional Flexographic Label printing capabilities and the HP Indigo Digital advantage. The combination of traditional flexographic label capabilities and digital printing offers our customers more versatile options and allows Columbine Label to handle jobs not typically suited for shorter run digital printing.

“The Digital Press is a significant investment for our company,” said Columbine Label president Greg Jackson. “It has allowed Columbine Label to support new markets and has improved our overall speed and order turn-around to the benefit of all of our customers.”

The Digital Press saves customers time and money with a quick turn-around, economical options for small jobs and minimal job set-up.

Every day, lab managers strive to run productive, efficient labs; after all, important, sometimes life-changing outcomes are on the line. The rising adoption of automation means many processes that were once time-consuming and tedious are now mechanized and reliable, thereby increasing lab productivity.

One area that is easy to overlook is a lab’s system for labeling samples. In this age of rapid technological advancement, it’s no longer good practice to rely on hand labeling or laser custom printing to label tubes, vials, plates and slides-it takes up valuable staff time and the risk of error is too high. Exposure to chemicals can cause ink smears or damage to the label surface itself, leading to mistakes in sample tracking, distortion or adhesive failure.

Because of routine exposure, selecting the right label printing system for the lab is as, if not more, important as selecting quality labware itself. When determining the best label for every lab environment, there are three key considerations: materials, imaging and adhesives.

Polymer is often the best label material because it’s resistant to chemicals and performs well in hot, cold and wet environments. Material flexibility and thickness are important for custom labels applied to irregular surfaces. Thickness is also a key consideration for labware that needs to be placed in holders or racks. For barcode and other high-density data storage images, thermal transfer printing is the optimal choice. It’s the most durable and it won’t smear. Thermal transfer imaging uses a heat-activated ribbon material in the label printer or printing service, which allows users to select the image durability most suitable for their application. Laserjet-printed labels often do not offer a high enough image resolution for barcode technology. Furthermore, inkjet direct mark images smear when exposed to chemicals like solvents, and their low resolution and lack of contrast makes them difficult to scan.

Quebecor Media Inc., whose flyers land on more than half of all Canadian doorsteps each week, is set to launch its own digital flyer printing service to tap web-savvy bargain hunters.

Quebecor has a long and successful history in the nyc printing business but only jump-started its flyer presses again roughly two years ago following the breakup of Quebecor World - at one time the largest printer anywhere on the planet.

Today, Quebecor, parent company to QMI Agency and Sun Media, is back in the flyer game in a big way pumping out colourful pages for distribution in more than 150 publications across seven provinces from two high-tech facilities in Toronto and Mirabel, Que.

Business is booming, said Philippe Guay, vice president, national sales, Quebecor Media Inc.

The company recently added big names to its roster of clients including Golf Town, the Shoe Company and Jean Coutu - the largest drugstore chain in Quebec.

“We’ve been trying to rebuild this business. It’s a lot smaller than it was before,” Guay said, adding Quebecor accounts for less than 3% of the overall Canadian flyer custom printing market.

But where Quebecor really enjoys bragging rights is in distribution.

Through its impressive network of daily and weekly newspapers stretching across the country, Quebecor delivers flyers to 6.7 million of the 13 million doorsteps in Canada every week.

“We are by far the largest flyer distributor in the country,” Guay said.

In fact, declining newspaper circulation and the growing popularity of the web hasn’t cut into Quebecor’s flyer business at all, Guay said.

“The paper flyer is still as, if not more, popular than it was five, six years ago,” he said.

More than 14 billion flyers were delivered to Canadians last year, according to the Flyer Distribution Standards Association (FDSA). Some 85% of Canadians peruse flyers “often” or at least “sometimes”, its studies show.

“It’s part of the routine of a lot of Canadians,” Guay said.

“So far there hasn’t been a real good, solid alternative to paper.”

Some retailers and printing services providers are looking to branch out online however.

“It’s the other phenomenon we’ve been seeing,” Guay said.

From SourceWire

Graphics and Print, the award-winning, Telford-based print manufacturer, have been providing printing services to businesses since 1980 and their design and print regularly helps customers with community based activities. And with Children in Need just a few weeks away, they have just launched their 50/50 offer. Managing Director, Martin Kells explains:

“Customers ask us all the time if we can support them with charity and community based activities and we are only too pleased to support where we can. We know that every year, thousands of businesses need printing services for things like poster printing and flyer printing linked to the great work they do for Children in Need so we thought we would proactively offer our support this year through our 50/50 offer. Put simply, this means that the first 50 businesses who approach us for help with printing services or creative graphic design for anything to do with the BBCs Children in Need appeal, we will provide up to £50 worth of design or print free of charge. Hopefully this helps businesses to save time designing or custom printing their own materials locally, enabling them to spend more time on the fund raising side of things.”

The fact that Graphics and Print has a design studio in-house means that their experienced team of designers has direct access to the print finishing team, ensuring that at every step of the print journey, their experts are working together to deliver a quality end product for all of their clients. This is one of the many reasons why Graphics and Print are award-winning commercial printers.

The Epson WorkForce 840 All-in-One Printer earned our CNET Editor’s Choice Award earlier this year for its workhorse features and ample 7.8-inch touch display, but we hesitated to recommend it to photographers when it stumbled through our photo print speed test. Today Epson answers back with the Epson Artisan 837 and the Artisan 730–two new wireless, touch-screen-enabled printers for the amateur photographer.

Both Artisan printers feature print, scan, fax, and copy functionality with the added convenience of a top-loading, 30-page auto-document feeder for scanning stacks of prints, hands-free. You can also ditch your camera’s USB cable in favor of the onboard media card slots. The printers also let you connect and print from any room in the house thanks to onboard Wi-Fi and Ethernet networking making them perfect for your small business custom printing needs like tri fold brochures or urgent card printing needs.

Perhaps the most significant hardware upgrade from previous iterations is the new midnight blue finish on the chassis, and the extended smart touch-panel display with an emerald backlight, instead of blue. Finally, the devices are also part of the Epson Connect family that let you print on the run with Epson’s mobile print apps for iOS and Blackberry devices.

The Epson Artisan 837 ($300) and the Artisan 730 ($200) will be available in September through retail outlets and online, and look out for reviews of both coming to CNET soon.

If you are tired of using flyers and business cards for your advertising we can recomend you using postcards. With postcards you will be doing the same as if you were spreading flyers but in this case will be with the best quality and you will get twice the amount of new customes with it.

Get all you postcards at 4over4.com, the online printing company.

4OVER4.COM is an online printing firm that practices GREEN PRINTING. They have recently announced their “100,000 Trees for Humanity” initiative which is their commitment to plant 100,000 trees. Please spread the word. One tree will be planted for every link back to www.4over4.com. I am showing my support by creating this link to http://www.4over4.com

Find out more at http://TREES.4OVER4.COM

Using postcards is considered to be one of the most popular ways to let people know about your business or company. If you have a small business, postcard printing is the marketing tool that will help you to let others know about your business and grab the attention you need to grow. All you need to do is to choose a great design and you will be making money in days.

With 4over4.com you can get all the postcards you need with its online printing service, but if you want to make the difference and work with recycled paper you can use the green printing service.

Post cards can be traced back to 1840 in which is known as the “pre-postcard era” because it was then when lithograph prints appeared, this prints were made in wood and were delivered by hand, then came the envelopes that had pictures in them and where introduced by D. William Mulready.

It was in 1861 that the first real post card came to be by the hands of John P. Charlton who even applied for a patent. They existed until 1873 which was the time when the government began printing its own.

In the United States pre-stamped postcards appeared around 1873 and the USPS was the only entity who was entitled to print them at the time. The interesting part is that when private companies were allowed to do so they couldn’t name their product “postcard” names such as “Private Mailing Card”, “Souvenir Card”, “Correspondence Card” and “Mail Card” where the terms used.

Dr. Emmanuel Hermann is known to have offered the first postcard to the Hungarian government back in 1869, three years later in England the first advertising card appeared, two years after Germany saw their first postcard as well. But fifteen years had to pass before the Heliogland, the first colored postcard in history, saw the light of day. And this was the start, between 1889 and 1890 postcards with pictures of the Eiffel Tower we incredibly popular.

Eight years later the U.S. saw the birth of the first private post cards, this postcards required a one cent stamp (same as government issued ones) to be mailed in, and contrary to those we have today, you could only add the stamp and write the recipients address on them. It was in 1907 when we see the first divided postcards, which allow the sender to write a short message on one side and the recipient information on the other along with the respective stamp.

After the First World War it was the US who got the lead in postcard printing because the usual providers, England and Germany, had their publishing housed bombed and machinery along with original arts was gone. Also publishers in the US, in an effort to low their cost, began to print the cards with a white border; this unfortunately led to loss of interest by collectors and user alike. What was not affected was the production of photographic postcards that were available in roadsides or near the places they depicted, hence the birth of the tradition of sending a postcard when visiting a place.

Then, and by the time the world was ravaged by World War Two, came linen postcards, technology advancements allowed publishing houses to try this new method in an effort to cope with the losses caused by the white border in previous years, but this method only lasted until 1939 when color chrome postcards emerged, even though it is registered that several publishing houses made linen cards even in the 1950s.

From 1939 until today little has changed on the way postcards are made, “photo chrome” is the method of choice and even though e-cards are also on the rise with the dawn of the internet, printed postcards remain very well alive.