William Arthur Holiday Digital Photo Cards
The primary advantage of digital printing is the fact that you can imprint your photo directly on the holiday card. This saves you the time of applying photos to the adhesive strips on the photo card or inserting the photos into tight slots. With quality 4″x 6″ prints readily available at less than $0.20, it is difficult to construct a case that digital printing is less expensive than conventional photographs. Applying consistent standards of paper weight, paper quality and equivalent printing and design standards, we can find no significant price advantage for digital imprinting over conventional photo cards.
Image resolution has always been the key factor in choosing between digital and conventional printing. In numerous side-by-side comparisons, I still maintain that a family photograph mounted on a framed holiday card is still the best way to showcase your family during the holiday season. That being said, digital printing now provides you with the opportunity to create custom photo cards that elegantly integrate the photograph(s) and supporting designs into elegant works of art.
Found below are two samples of William Photo Cards. The first image, “Christmas 2008”, depicts a 4”x 6” photo card that was applied to the card using adhesive strips.
William Arthur Photo Card
The second image (shown below) is a reproduction of a digital photo card that makes use of two of the eight William Arthur custom colors to create a distinctive holiday card.
William_Arthur_Digital_Photo_Card
Both images were scanned at a resolution of 300 dpi and then converted into gif images for the web. While both images are considerably sharper to the naked eye, the different printing process highlights several important differences. First, digital photo cards tend to have more of a matte finish and appear softer, even pastel-like. Second, glossy photographs rich in color tend to work best with bold colored borders. Third, there is no way to digitally reproduce the stunning engraved or letterpress borders that frame your photograph using photographs. Finally, as with any digital printing process, you generally have more flexibility in determining the layout of your photo card and customization of your holiday greeting.
Low quality internet resolutions do not do justice to William Arthur’s beautiful designs. I strongly suggest that you contact a Guild Member store in your neighborhood to see whether William Arthur’s new digital printing technology is right for you.
Richard May