Rob's Blog

Review ‘Stress Free Print’? Pretty stressful actually.
09th Oct 2008 13:10

Over two weeks ago I sent the inlay for Ange's CD to be printed by Stress Free Print (stressfreeprint.co.uk). I've used them before and they seemed fairly good. Unfortunately, not this time. The first proof was massively dark, the second lighter but totally the wrong colours. The third, little to no improvement over the second. Their was also a serious inconsistency between the first and second print on an A3 sheet being printed 2-up. How they managed to get things so utterly wrong is a bit of a mystery. Their internal communication when it came to sorting out the issue also seemed to be lacking rather significantly. I was told by them: "Regrettably this is just a limitation of our digital printing methods. Really for a job like this - with vignetting - you need to be using a litho printer." Maybe I'm being naive, but I thought digital printing was very much at a stage where a 300dpi Photoshop PSD could be printed with relative accuracy. If not - then perhaps Stress Free Print shouldn't advertise their services as such? The inlay itself wasn't that complicated- in fact it's pretty much just a purple and black gradient background with text on top. They've issued a refund, but it's put the project back two weeks and definitely lost my custom. Cheap? Yes. Any good? No, not really.