The honest break even is somewhere around a thousand copies, and it is worth knowing because it is the difference between two prices that look unrelated.
Customers are often puzzled that a thousand flyers cost barely more than five hundred, and then that five thousand cost far less per piece than either. It is because those are two different machines with two different cost shapes, and knowing which you want is the easiest money anybody reading this will save.
A digital press has almost no setup. You send the file, it prints, and each sheet costs roughly the same as the last one. That makes it the only sensible way to print a hundred business cards, a run of fifty posters or twelve copies of a report, and it is also what makes a proof possible at all.
An offset press has a large setup: plates are made for each colour and the press is brought up to colour on waste sheets before the good ones start. That cost is the same whether you print five hundred or fifty thousand, so the price per piece falls steeply. Once the setup is spread over enough copies, offset is dramatically cheaper and the printing is also a little crisper, particularly on solid areas of colour.
The break even is somewhere between eight hundred and fifteen hundred copies depending on the size and the number of colours. Below that, print digitally. Above about two thousand you are throwing money away by not going to plates.
What we do here is print digitally up to about a thousand and send larger runs to an offset press in Malé that we have used for years, at the offset price, with our handling as a separate line on the quotation. We did forty thousand flyers for a community association that way last year and it saved them about eleven thousand rufiyaa against what we could have charged on our own machine. We would rather do that than have somebody discover afterwards that they overpaid, because they will.
Two cautions about offset. It needs a longer lead time, four to five working days rather than two, because plates and drying are real steps. And the first sheets are not the colour of the last sheets unless somebody stands at the press and watches it, which is why we go and look at the start of any run we send out.
If you are printing something for the first time and you do not know how many you will need, print two hundred digitally and use them. You will learn more about the design from two hundred real ones than from a proof, and then print the thousand.
