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Paper, the life blood of the printing industry. Coated and uncoated, matte, silk, gloss, boards, card, translucent, plastics, raw and recycled, digital, off-set, laser; we bandy about these terms while talking to you about your printing and we get to see that ‘deer in headlights’ look. Well I’m going to talk about all of these terms in plain English so you can better understand your choices when it comes to the paper we use for your printing.
We have talked about this before in previous articles but just to refresh your memory… Coated paper has a fine coating of powers like china clay to improve the whiteness/brightness and to give it a finish or shine. Uncoated papers have no treatment on the surface of the paper. When you look at the papers after they have been printed, the coated papers have brighter colour with some type of finish, while uncoated tends to look a little paler and feel more ‘papery.’ Uncoated advantage is that it is easier to write on or stamp with an ink stamp.
When you have a coated paper, the mixture of chemicals and treatments affects how the finished paper looks. Like paints, they come in three basic types, matte which has a dull/low sheen finish, gloss which has strong shiny finish, and silk/satin which sits in between the two. The choice of finish does effect the look of printed item, introducing slight shifts in colour or contrast, but this depends from job to job. With digital printing the type of finish has less of an effect than when printed using off-set.
Naturally paper manufacturers design papers for each type of system to guarantee the best results every time. Off-set paper are designed to be printed as flat sheets with liquid inks, so they have a semi porous surface to allow the ink to seep without the lines bleeding. Digital print refers to toner style print systems so their paper has to be more flexible and be subject to high temperature without distortion.
These are general terms to describe different weights or thickness of papers. The thicker or higher GSM the paper the stiffer the paper is. As general rule of thumb, papers are up to 200gsm, card is 200gsm – 350gsm, and board is above 350gsm which they start measuring it by the thickness in microns (1/1000 mm.) If you want printing on board stock, this requires specialty print systems and high setup costs. That being said, there are ways around if you want to have something printed on thick board.
This covers any weight of paper or card that has a colour other than pure white. With modern colour printing technology getting so cheap and the issue of colour shifting when printing on a coloured background, tinted papers have fallen out use to a large extent. As such the cost of printing on a colour paper can often far outweigh the cost of colour printing on white paper. There are situations where using tinted paper can work, we often do takeaway menus on tinted paper with black only print to create something eye catching but keeping the cost low.
Textured paper is anything that doesn’t have a smooth surface. This includes linen, leather, parchment, and other finishes. Now this can be problematic for many printers, including ourselves, as printing technology is design for smooth papers to get the best results at the fastest speed. While they can print on textured papers there can be patchiness in places. For some situations that is a desirable effect, but we are always be willing print test samples if you bring paper in to try.
These papers, normally lighter than 80gsm copy paper, are made with a special process to make them semi transparent/translucent, like a wax or tracing paper. Here at Copy Express we use papers as light as 53gsm with the only limitation because they are so thin that they can’t handle being printed on both side with our equipment.
Recycled papers represent a combination of both the tinted and textured papers for us printers. they cost more than the matching commercially farmed papers, they can cause colour shifts when printed on, and they often have a surface finish that effect the print quality. Nine times out of ten because our standard papers as ‘green’ the recycled papers it’s often cheaper and more reliable to print the recycled look on the paper than to print on the actual paper.
Synthetics are plastics to be used in situations where paper would not work, such as the outdoors where paper disintegrates from exposure to moisture. More the domain of digital printers, what you can print on paper you can print on synthetics. The only downside is that they will never be as stiff as the equivalent papers because of how they are made. The cost of the plastics is many more times that of paper but where you need long usable life, it’s worth the investments
When you need stickers in paper or plastic, we can print them for you using adhesive stocks. Naturally they limited to one sided printing. We can get ‘die cut’ sheets for special sticker jobs like bottle labels. Die cut means that the surface layer has been cut to a shape but left on the backing paper to make it easy to print on. There are many premade design to work with and we can even get custom cutting dies made, for a price.
We have access to a whole range of custom papers for specialty printing jobs here at Copy Express. Custom index tabs, Overhead Projector prints, No Carbon Required sheets, magnetic sheets, are just a few of the items we can print for you. If you need something special ask us and if we can’t do it we know who can and organise it for you.