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The Great Paper Chase - Boards, Cards and Panoramas - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2015

Cards
Most cards are sold ready creased but flat so that they transport through many of the smaller printers. Our own card printer is an Epson 'workhorse', B510 which rattles cards out at a heck of a speed. Your cost calculations have to include the blank, envelope and glassine along with running costs and labour. With care you can hit between 25p and 35p for a set which is already very much lower than the cost of fine art blanks. If you are using fine art blanks (at nearer £1 per set) then you have to make a premium price, which you might selling them yourself, but are unlikely to turn a profit if you have to pay a mark-up to a gallery. The mark-up for high street stores such as Debenhams is actually closer to 300%.

An alternative to buying pre-creased blanks is to source paper, envelopes and glassines separately and buy a creasing machine. They can be had for less than £100 (for an A3 model try Permajet; see left). This enables you to use standard stock inkjet paper thus offering a large range of options.

Panorama Paper
If your printer has a roll feed and a cutter then you should be able to make pans of almost any length. There are 'pan' rolls of 13-inch width. Aside from that there are a few specialist pan papers around from Fotospeed (reviewed recently in Professional Imagemaker) and Pinnacle. We used the Pinnacle Premium Lustre 300gsm which is 900mm long and 297mm in width. Pinnacle also make pan-shaped window mounts for smaller images. If you do use cut sheets for panoramas, make sure that the outgoing sheet is well supported to prevent it skewing with the drag of the paper. Ideally the paper should exit onto a smooth and flat surface, level with the exit throat. Cutting an A2 sheet in half along the longest length gives a pan 231⁄2 x 81⁄4 inches which is a handy size and does of course give access to all the paper types that are available.

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1st Published 01/08/2015
last update 09/12/2022 14:57:18

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