With the number of giclée printers out there increasing steadily how do you find one that will work well for you? You may think it's just a matter of sending a digital image to your chosen printers and waiting for your prints to arrive in the post, but unfortunately it isn't as simple as that.
Our experience is that getting consistently good results from a printing outlet can be very difficult indeed. Since we set up and digitise our own artwork, the setup process has not proved to be a problem, and the reproduction of the original has usually been very good, but various printers in the UK have let us down on other aspects of their service, so it's very much buyer beware, and I hope this article will help you to avoid any expensive pitfalls before they happen.
One of the problems that we have found is in the posting and delivery of stretched canvas. You will find very many people on the Internet offering this service but it's been our experience that stretched canvases often do not travel well in the post, and indeed one printer we spoke to was very reluctant to have them posted out at all and was only happy to sell them if you would collect them from his office in person. This is all well and good if you happen to live within driving distance of your printer and have the time to make the journey, not forgetting to add the extra cost of petrol for your journey when calculating the cost of the print. Even if the stretched canvas has been carefully packaged the printer cannot guarantee that the delivery service will take all necessary care of the package while in transit and, if it is damaged, who pays?
If it is clear that damage to the prints has occurred during transit then the delivery company will pay if there was sufficient insurance to cover the package. But, what if it is plain that the damage occurred before the prints were shipped and it is evidently due to careless handling of the prints before they were posted?
This is where I would advise you to read your printer's terms and conditions very carefully, because we were caught out recently.
We purchased a quantity of giclée prints and picked them up personally so as to avoid any potential damage in transit. On arriving back in our studio we carefully unpacked the prints only to find that six of them were damaged. On contacting the printing company’s owner he required that the prints be returned to him for 'inspection' and yet he refused to pay for their return and could not guarantee that he would replace them.
This means that you, the artist, end up bearing the costs of returning damaged prints, and you have no guarantee that you will ever receive saleable prints, or indeed any prints, in return.
Our last printing company told us that if replacement prints were produced they would not be ready for collection for several days and we would have to bear the cost of collection as well.
Meanwhile you could have a customer waiting who is steadily getting more irate at the length of time his order is delayed, so as well as losing money because of the extra you have had to pay out for return and redelivery of replacement prints, you may also lose the goodwill of a customer through no fault of your own.
If you check out our useful links page you will see that there is currently no one listed under 'giclée printing'. There used to be one or two companies listed there, but we have now removed them as they either offered very poor customer support, or because their returns policies turned out to be in breach of UK trading standards.
I’m not saying that there are no good giclée printers out there, only that we have not been able to find any who maintained a good standard of service after the first few orders.
If you know of any who are consistently reliable, provide you with good quality prints, and helpful customer service even when there is a problem, then email us with your comments, we would love to hear about them.
We have now purchased our own Giclee printing equipment, as we no longer have any faith in printers who appear to have no respect for us or our work, so now we can produce our own Giclee prints confident in the knowledge that they will be of good quality and our customer service is definitely both friendly and reliable :)
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