Buying print,
explained.

Offset transfers ink from a metal plate to a rubber blanket and from the blanket to the sheet. There is set-up in making a plate for each color, and after that the cost per sheet is low — so offset wins as the run grows, and it is what you want for spot colors and larger sheets. Digital images the sheet straight from the file with no plate at all, so a short run costs a fraction of the offset set-up. Omega runs both and will quote whichever is cheaper at your quantity.

Ask for a spot color. A spot ink is mixed to a specific formula and printed from its own plate, so it lands on the same color job after job. Process color builds the shade out of cyan, magenta, yellow and black screens, which is fine for photographs but shifts with the stock and the press. Omega still prints spot colors for identities and logos alongside four-color process work.

One to five color offset. Four of those are the process inks — cyan, magenta, yellow and black — which between them produce full-color photographs; a fifth unit lets a spot ink run alongside the four process inks in the same pass.

Coated stock holds ink on the surface, so photographs stay sharp and colors stay bright; it comes gloss, silk or matte. Uncoated absorbs a little ink, reads softer, and is what you want if anyone has to write on it. Weight is the other half: text weight for pages inside a booklet, cover weight for the cover, a card for business cards and postcards. Describe the piece and we will suggest something.

Saddle stitching nests folded sheets inside one another and staples through the spine. It is the cheapest way to bind a booklet, it looks like a magazine, and the page count has to be a multiple of four. Coil binding punches holes and spins a plastic coil through them: any page count, it opens dead flat, and it folds all the way back on itself — which is why manuals, calendars and anything used on a workbench get coiled. Coil color and size are your choice.

Folding — letter, Z, parallel, double parallel and more, up to four folds in a unit — plus saddle stitching, coil and GBC binding, cutting, three-hole drilling, padding, scoring, wafer sealing and shrink wrapping. It is all in the same building, so a booklet is printed, folded, stitched and trimmed without leaving it.

Yes. Addressing runs on a Cheshire ink-jet transport that wafer-seals in line with addressing, and a Bell & Howell inserter puts up to seven pieces into one envelope. Omega handles bulk presorted mailings, standard and first class. Tell us it is a mailing piece before it is designed — the postal requirements affect the size, the fold and where the address can sit.

Presorted mail is sorted by ZIP code and bundled into trays before it reaches the post office, which is work the USPS would otherwise do itself. It pays for that with a lower postage rate. The Postal Service sets the floor — 200 pieces (or 50 pounds) for bulk standard, 500 for presorted first class — and below that a piece goes at the single-piece rate. On a run above it, the postage saving is usually larger than the cost of the sorting.