What Poster Printing Styles Are Best

Short Run Inkjet Poster Printing:

When you require a small quantity of a large sheet of paper, the poster printing technology that will fulfill your cost expatiations is "ink jet" poster printing. This poster printing technology is built for the short run and utilizes a continuous roll form of paper. You can benefit from both the smaller poster printing sizes and mural size, depending on the ink jet poster printing machine utilized.

The expectation of better pricing, a common belief, due to small poster printing quantities fall short once you require posters in the hundreds. The reason for this is the unit pricing of the ink jet technology is high by comparison to offset poster printing with ink. An example would be a when you are printing posters of the standard 24 x 36" size. A quantity of about 60 would be about the same cost as printing posters on an offset ink press of 1,000. Therefore, when you are printing posters and require more than 40-50, start thinking offset poster printing as there is no mid point quantity that can currently offer better pricing.

Cost Effective Printing:

As stated above, when you are printing posters, understand unit pricing and you will understand which will best suit your needs. Further more, in poster printing, size matters. This typically is because of how many a large parent sheet can yield. In poster printing a finished size of 24 x 36" can only run one up on a typical commercial 40" press. Therefore, when looking at a 22 x 27 or 28" size, you will still only benefit from running one up on either a 40" press or the smaller mid size press at 28". Therefore there is not a great savings except for paper, which is not overly significant in smaller runs. However, once you consider the 18 x 24" or the 17 x 22" sizes, here two can fit and run 2 up on a large parent sheet and the economy is then obvious. The savings continue when you run an 11 x 17" size, as here four can fit on the parent sheet, as well as run on the smaller GTO type color presses.

Large Size Posters:

  • In today's world of the commercial printers, the standard large size of a poster is 24 x 36" and is printed on a 27 x 40" or 28 x 41" offset press. For a bit more money in paper, your project can go to 25 x 38", OR 27 X 39.75" or more, depending on the press used.
  • Super size: Yes, there are presses that can print super sized ones, like they did in the old days of the Hollywood movie studios. In today's industry, sizes of approximately 30 x 60" or 40 x 70" can be done, but this is not the primary function of these presses. These  presses are not generally used for this but used for "litho sheets", which is a label type stock that laminates to board stock or corrugated stock of various types for packaging and boxes. Generally, as a result, you will find that once you get to these sizes, your cost will be anywhere from 3-5 times the cost of on a commercial 40" press.