
Battle of the Business Cards - kmfrk
http://p.printingchoice.com/battle-of-the-business-cards/
======
jasonlotito
Or, you could just go to a local print shop. My wife used to work at one
before moving up in the world. Practically ran the place for the owner. Good
quality cards, and if something was wrong, they'd fix it. You got to see the
options before you made a choice, and much easier to get exactly what you
wanted. Also, from what I see in the chart, you'd get it a LOT sooner then
most of the places.

~~~
sfphotoarts
I prefer online to avoid interacting with some high schooler that has no clue
about color management. My experience with retail is that it's typically
excruciating. People get distracted, fail to accurately record details, are
often doing retail and a filler and would rather get back to finishing their
chemistry homework the minute I walk out the door. I have more faith in well
respected online business' that pay attention to detail, like amazon.

~~~
colanderman
Although ironically, one of the printers tested (Moo or VistaPrint, hard to
tell from the pic) didn't even print at the correct resolution.

~~~
JeffJenkins
He mentions in the comments that Moo is English and printing in the correct
size for that market.

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Anechoic
Having ordered business cards from Vistaprint and Overnight Prints, let me
make a couple of observations:

* Vistaprint had decent print quality, but IMO their paper quality left something to be desired. The biggest issue with VP (again IMO) is that their business cards are standard-sized, they are slightly smaller. It makes the card stand out a bit, but you have to decide if it stands out in a good way or a bad way

* I've used Overnight Prints for the vast majority of business cards. I've only used the "Value Cards" products (basically printed on a laser printer" as opposed to the offset press printing of the Premium cards. They use a very thick stock, and I often get positive comments on the "feel" of the card stock. At first glance the print quality looks pretty good, but upon a closer look you can see that the cards were printed on a laser printer (I presume that the offset-printed cards look better).

* The biggest 'gotcha' with Overnight Prints (at least the Value cards) is the color consistency - that is to say, there is none. They don't pay attention to embedded color profiles, and _every_ order I've made the colors come out different. I don't mind too much because I know that my clients aren't comparing colors and I figure most of my cards either get scanned/transcribed into electronic address books and then put away, or get tossed out. But if you're someone who obsesses over the color consistency of your printed material, definitely stay away from the Value Cards (again I don't know if things are better with the Premium Cards).

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kmfrk
Mirror, in case HN or reddit breaks the non-WP Cache'd site:
<http://i.imgur.com/vokDd.jpg>. (Again.)

Edit: Looks like it did indeed buckled.

~~~
pmichaud
Thanks a lot, I wouldn't have been able to look at this without your comment.

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limedaring
It always surprises me how many people don't know about Moo.com. Fast, fairly
cheap, and really fantastic quality. And if quality isn't great, they'll
reprint it.

A few years ago I was ordering Christmas cards for my company, and I
accidentally had a typo. I contacted them to see if I could get a discount at
least since I was ordering them all again, and they insisted on reprinting
them for free and even expedited the shipping to me.

Compare that to OvernightPrints, when our business cards came back with
streaks all over them, and after I called and emailed them several times, I
never got a response. Of course I'm going to use Moo.com for everything now.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Plus moo has smaller sized cards which all the cool kids are using these days.

~~~
athst
I would recommend against getting abnormally-sized cards like this. After
collecting cards from a group of people, it's annoying to have these
stragglers swimming around in your pocket that don't really fit with the rest.
I'd rather have a standard sized card that is designed well.

~~~
limedaring
Do you find you discriminate against those that have the oddly-sized cards, or
do you pay them more attention? Think those that got the mini-cards were going
for the latter effect.

~~~
athst
I try not to, but I think subconsciously that slight inconvenience caused by
weird cards has to register somewhere. I'm sure people perceive them
differently, but to me an odd card is more centered on the giver than the
receiver, even though the receiver is really the person it should be designed
for.

In any case, if I want to follow up with someone I don't think a weird card
would make me NOT follow up with them - it's more of a subtle thing.

------
brixon
Your local print shop might not be printing their own business cards. My dad
owned a print shop and he has been outsourcing the printing of business cards
for over 10 years. He makes a little profit on outsourced cards (@$5 per
thousand) and no profit on in-house printed cards. The only cards he prints
in-house are car dealerships that have mass bulk with only the salesman
contact information changing. Now, he can help you pick the stock, ink and
other options and will make sure the order/product is correct before you pay
him, so there is some benefit to local.

~~~
dholowiski
Absolutley true, I know of at least two print shops who order many of their
jobs from Vistaprint.

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davidw
Seems like he's leaving money on the table by not linking those to the
relevant affiliate programs.

~~~
Encosia
Trading a few dollars in affiliate revenue for credibility can be well worth
it, depending on the post's goals. Just look at how people react to Atwood's
referral-laden product posts on Coding Horror, for example.

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yoseph
@PrintingChoice

This is a great piece of marketing. It provides me with some very useful
information while selling me on your value prop.

Brilliant.

------
jackowayed
I just ordered 1k business cards from Overnight Prints in preparation for
RubyConf. I was impressed by the quality, given how cheap they were. They were
thicker than I expected.

My one complaint is that you either pay a lot for shipping or get them fairly
slowly. (I upgraded one level from the bottom and it took from Tuesday to the
next Thursday.) Even that shipping was expensive--it was $8 shipping plus $4
"handling". Others may be just as bad though.

Overall, I was quite happy. I paid $40 with shipping and CA tax for 1,000 high
quality, double-sided color business cards thanks to a half off coupon I found
on retailmenot.com.

And if you're coming to RubyConf, find me and I'll give you one.

------
nkurz
The quality comparisons here are quite helpful, but the pricing isn't that
useful. If you're willing to do a little digging, you can find 30-50% off
coupons for the big guys like PSPrint and VistaPrint. Not sure if this is also
true for the smaller places like Moo. Also, the prices dive sharply at larger
quantities.

We're currently using PSPrint for business cards, and would agree with this
assessment: "flimsy, but otherwise nice". For our recent order with coupon, we
were at final price of $130 for 10000. If you are in the Bay Area, you can
pick up for free from their warehouse in Emeryville.

------
alinajaf
Woohoo go us! (dev at moo)

~~~
duck
A recent client had Moo biz cards and the quality of the card itself was
awesome and very thick. They had a photo on one side that looked great, but
the side with their information was kind of blurry. Is that just from them not
doing something right in the creation of the card or just from the type of
card stock Moo uses?

~~~
eschutte2
I received 50 cards from Moo this week. I love the shape and the paper quality
and cutting are very good. They also upgraded my shipping for free, which was
nice of them. However, the print quality is pretty poor--the text is visibly
grainy. Might be my fault as I had to upload the whole card as a 600dpi image,
but I'd expect that to be sufficient. I used the recycled paper option. I'd go
with Moo in the future if I could be confident the print quality would be
fixed.

~~~
sjwright
Did you make sure the text in your image was __not __anti-aliased? Anti-
aliasing is a hack for monitors, not printers.

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neilk
Given this information, I don't see how the author recomended VistaPrint in
any way.

It looks to me like it's Moo for quality and speed, Overnight for price, and
everything else is significantly worse in every dimension.

~~~
igrekel
Right, I am puzzled too, especially since that according to his graph it was
actually overnight prints that was the cheapest with better quality than
vistaprint. I don't see how with these results the author can recommend
vistaprint unless there is a mistake somewhere.

~~~
jpwagner
that price is for the min number of cards, per card price would look different

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mbubb
Just got my new cards from zazzle today. Used them before and was happy but
wish I had this info. Next time will try moo.

Question: what do others think about a large business card size. I like that
because i inevitably jot something on the card when i give it to someone. The
last example was that I was talking to a dogrun acquaintance about vyatta (ie
the router project) and gave my card with the word 'vyatta' on it.

I have a minimal amount of information - name, email, google voice number as
well as a small qr_code barcode which links to my online profile.

I think the oversized card (called a 'calling card' I believe) enables you to
have a nice a mount of room for a graphic and room to write something.

~~~
enjo
If it doesn't fit in the standard card slot in my wallet, I'll likely
(politely) give it back and ask for an e-mail. I hate toting around oversized
cards, and just feel wasteful throwing them in my pocket to be tossed later.

~~~
mbubb
thanks - good point

------
eli
Worth noting that Overnight Prints very frequently has coupons for significant
savings: <http://www.retailmenot.com/view/overnightprints.com>

Currently it's 50% off premium biz cards. I think they're very hard to beat at
that price.

~~~
dotBen
Just want to re-emphasize the discounts. Check retailmenot.com etc.

I often order 250 cards from Overnight Prints for about $15 inc shipping. The
quality is only bettered by Moo (great company but expensive).

------
thomas11
The final recommendation based on cost is Vistaprint, when their price was $25
compared to Overnight's $9?

~~~
Bostwick
Vistaprint was 250 cards for $24.25, for a per-card price of $0.097. Overnight
was 25 cards for $8.81, for a per-card price of $0.352.

On a per-card basis, Overnight is 3.6x as expensive as Vistaprint.

~~~
fragmede
It's a shame there isn't a graph showing the per-card price since that's the
obvious question after seeing that Overnight Prints was only $8.81 to
VistaPrint's $24.25

------
camtarn
Funky and very useful website :) I had some cards printed out by VistaPrint a
while back (using one of the free business card package fliers from an Amazon
parcel) and was relatively impressed - having a stack of business cards with
my name on them felt very professional to my just-graduated-looking-for-work
self.

However, you'd think the creator of such a nicely designed site would spell
check their copy: in the footer, 'compareproducts' has no space between words,
and there's a misspelled 'annoucnements' on the front page :/ Also, the 'DIY
Printing' link in the menu bar 404s.

------
mikeryan
I have no relation to this company, but I've always been very happy with my
cards from 4by6 <http://www.4by6.com/> (not covered in review)

~~~
kmfrk
I saw a link to them in the reddit thread, but I was completely confounded by
the fact that they don't show image samples of the different business cards. I
see that they send out samples (at least to people from the US), but the
approach makes no sense to me.

<http://www.deeprint.co.uk> do this, too.

------
hedgehog
Avery 8871, they look good and you can print a few cards when you need them
(and change them when you want).

------
gallamine
I've recently been ordering from Clubflyers. I got a batch of 4x6 cards and
business cards. The price was better than I could find elsewhere and they did
a great job. The cheap printing is glossy only though.

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sbierwagen
One of the winners in the shootout was Moo.

I went up to the top level page and searched on two sided, 50 count,
whatever's cheapest business cards... and got four hits. All of them for Moo.

Hmm.

~~~
shanedanger
Moo is the only one who lets you print just 50 cards, with the exception of
ONP who hasn't updated in the price search yet. If you search for other
quantities you'll see plenty of others. :)

------
lowglow
Anyone know of a great print shop in San Francisco?

~~~
lerhaupt
was going to go with moo but wanted the more traditional business card size.
just went to h&h imaging at 16th/alabama, really great service, options,
price. <http://www.yelp.com/biz/h-and-h-imaging-san-francisco>

~~~
lowglow
Great, thanks for the heads up. :)

Edit: Oh, wow I work on 16th and Harrison. This is perfect.

------
terra_t
I'm just astonished at how much blatant link bait is getting voted up on HN
these days. It's starting to look like Digg.

~~~
limedaring
Even if it has genuinely interesting and informative content?

~~~
terra_t
It's just not interesting and informative enough.

------
crgwbr
I've never done business cards through Printrunner, but their Matte-finish
postcards are super high quality

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snprbob86
Been very happy with cards, shirts, and service ordered from Zazzle!

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PonyGumbo
I'm glad that Vistaprint got the drubbing it deserves.

------
blaines

      "Error establishing a database connection"

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clistctrl
I've always assumed what you get is going to be about the same anywhere so
price is the only comparison, but its great to see just how much worse the
quality of vistaprint is.

------
shin_lao
Off topic but when reading this article I couldn't help thinking about the
famous business card scene from American Psycho.

 _Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my
God, it even has a watermark!_

