Why are Caralan so inexpensive compared to my local printers? - A general colour printer will run your job on its own even though it is actually much smaller than the paper size and press he uses. Consequently if you want 500 colour business cards you will have to pay for the full setup and the whole press time taken. We specialise in printing full colour jobs in batches and will print several jobs of the same type together on the same sheet so spreading the setup cost. If you wanted 50,000 cards you may find your local prices more competitive.

Does printing jobs together mean quality deteriorates? - No, though it does mean that we must always print to standard ink densities and will not vary inking for an individual job.

I don't know much about computers, can I successfully produce my own artwork? - Yes, if you take it seriously and read our artwork help pages. These pages are specially written to help people save money by producing their own artwork. Please remember that much of the money you save will be lost if you don't do the job properly and we have to charge you to correct your artwork. We do not charge enough for our printing service to allow us to carry the man hours needed to correct customers artwork problems without charge.

I've noticed anomalies in your pricing structure, are they errors? - No. Because of the way we print jobs together our pricing structure does not follow the pattern of traditional print costing.

What standards of quality and service can I expect? - You can expect the work we produce to be of a good commercial standard and that it be delivered within about 10 working days from receipt of a valid order (see our Terms of Business page ). We may deliver sooner or later than 10 days depending on factors that can only be estimated when we know exactly what you want, what you expect us to work from and our workload at the time. Since many factors are involved we can only give estimated delivery times.

Why aren't re-runs cheaper? - Traditionally in printing if a customer returns for a re-run of a job already printed then it is sensible to expect plates and films to be taken from storage to be used again. Money is saved since they do not have to be produced all over again. Because we virtually never print a single job on a single set of plates we cannot do this. Re-runs are only cheaper if you originally paid us to do the artwork as you will not need to pay for the artwork element again.

Do you store my artwork for future use? - Yes. All jobs are backed up to our electronic archive. You can use your invoice number for reference. There is no extra charge for archiving your job or retrieving it for a straight reprint though there will be a processing charge for retrieval and sending your artwork to you or a third party. This is unfortunate but unavoidable because of the number of people constantly requesting that we retrieve artwork and do something with it other than reprint the original job as-is. Because this takes time and takes us away from what our customers primarily pay us to do we can no longer maintain this as a free service. (Please Note: our archiving of your files is not in any way a guaranteed service and you are expected to keep your own copies of all the artwork for your jobs)

Why do you not send hard copy proofs of artwork I supply? - We will not automatically send hard copy (usually inkjet) proofs of your job unless we think there is a potential problem and you need to hold something in your hand and look at it. This is largely because of the time and delays involved with the postal system. It's faster and much more efficient to use our electronic proofing system. If you ask us to send repeated hard copy proofs because of your artwork problems we will need to make an additional charge depending on the work involved

Do you charge for proofs of artwork I supply? - So long as you have placed an order and paid at least a deposit we will provide the first online proof for free. If this reveals errors you may change your artwork and resubmit it. We will then provide another free online proof. If there are problems at this stage and you need us to get involved further we will charge you for our time. You can use our online proofing system yourself free of charge as much as you like, whenever you like. Basically if you provide us with your own artwork we expect it to be finished and in a useable condition. When we supply you with a free online proof it is intended to be a final check before print - not part of your artwork development.

How does your online proofing system work? - Your job is processed through our prepress system and instead of making a set of plates from the resulting high resolution bitmaps the data is downsampled and the plates combined to produce a CMYK TIF or JPEG file. This is then placed on our web server and you are emailed a link to this file and any prepress messages. You can then visit our website and download your proof. We have provided an open interface to this system whereby you can visit our proofing page and proof your jobs yourself free of charge.

What do I need to use online proofing? - A working email address and an internet connection. If you wish to proof jobs yourself you also need to be able to produce a postscript, eps or pdf file.

Are your online proofs perfect? - There are certain caveats involved with our electronic proofing - see our proofing pages for more details. However we think our online proofs are about as good as you can get without spending money. Since the proofs are prepared from the same output stream used for print data there should be no content errors - font data, overprint and transparency are all preserved. You are looking at a rendered down version of the actual data used to print your job, not - as in some other systems - a facsimile of your job produced separately from the printing system proper.

Can I send Film Separations? - Probably not. All our page imposition is done electronically - we do not get involved in manual film planning and consequently your films would cause us problems unless you could supply complete imposed signatures.