I found a place to get really, really good prints

Some previous threads have talked about how cafepress.com works for doing prints, mugs, etc. for your artwork. I wanted to make sure that other creators here have had a chance to check out http://www.zazzle.com.

Their printing is 6-color on HP DesignJet large format printers, so you can work with a wider color range than CMYK for prints. So far I've test-ordered a number of cards, and the printing (aside from a tendency to overink dark greens) is very good. They're definitely pushing the rich color settings to the maximum.

Like CafePress, you can set up your own user area and link to it. Unlike CafePress, it doesn't cost you anything, but instead of being able to set your own prices, you get a percentage of the sales of the product.

I'm impressed, and I thought that there might be several other people here who would like a high production quality net venue for their work.

Astra - thanks for that. I will check it out. We do our own prints but it tends to be a lot of work as we spend time setting up the colour balance of each one - also we use water colour paper that has to be cut by hand. Sometimes we simply don't have time.

We have been looking for some way of doing prints more easily, so this might be an idea.

I have a feeling we will still end up doing them mostly ourselves though, but maybe with some of the more popular ones printed by our printer.

We're currently working with an artist here on greetings cards, but the work is very detailed and it has to be specialist printed with embossing and gold and silver inks (quite exciting in fact, the artist is a woman who does the most beautiful collage work by hand - and knows a lot about Prague).

If you decide to use Zazzle yourelf, please keep us informed about how it works for you.

A major change to the previous post - Zazzle is not using 6 color printing, only standard CMYK, although they have some plans to upgrade in the future. I had queried one of the artists who posts there, before, but I finally got back word from the horse's mouth.

Still, they're doing a good job with what they've got. I have about 60 items up there, at http://www.zazzle.com/contributors/home/default.asp?cid=238875290857736558 at this point, though I haven't updated my website yet to reflect it. I had ordered test copies of about 16 of the designs, and generally they were very high quality.

On eBay in the art section a lot of prints are being listed now as 'gocco prints', which apparently is an art printing process that gives rich color.

I'm not sure if it's a process or a machine name, but I did find a little on it here:

http://www.nehoc.com.au/training/index.htm

The website for the Gocco printers is http://www.gocco.com - just googled a bit and came up with it - they're fascinating little things.

Oops! Oops, my bad. I knew the name started with a G, but it's 'giclee' not gocco, I thought I had the right one till I checked in the print section on eBay. It's the process of getting high quality pictures done on prints that are the quality of the original. Here's a URL for it. Supposedly it's affordable for the artist too, though a person's idea of affordability changes with their budget.

http://www.artonsilk.com/whatgiclee.htm

Hi Hudson,

I think - looking at the page - that these are what in the UK are called "Iris prints". We often used them to see a high-quality draft of a final design - before doing the full print run.
They are very nice quality and I know lots of designers tended to store the Iris prints away - just because they are nice things to have.

I think what would worry me is the "never leave them in direct sunlight" advice. I know this applies to most prints but I now wonder if Iris prints are particularly subject to fading? We now use fade-proof inks as we did some initial experiments with our prints (nothing very sophisticated, we just put them up in the window!) and found that some of the ones in non fade-proof ink lost their colour really fast.

Anyway, all interesting stuff.