Know of any good Portland print houses that do big stuff quickly?

May 22, 2007 10:11 AM

Anyone know of any good large-format (5 foot by 3 foot poster) printers in the Portland, Oregon area? I've been burned by the wrath of Kinko's too many times and I need it within 48 hours. I know the right outfit could do it in just a few minutes, and I don't care what it costs.

It's a scientific poster, meant to be rolled out for display at a conference on a wall. I only have two days to turn it around and the one local shop with a large printer said it would have to be sent out and would take at least until the weekend to return.

I'm kind of stuck, time is running out, and I don't know of any nearby printers that can go bigger than 4 feet wide on their printouts. The Portland phonebook has zillions and I don't know which ones to call or who I can trust to do it quickly.

Anyone got any experience with this sort of thing in the area?

posted by mathowie to media & arts (7 comments total)

I've used Photo Craft downtown. They were speedy and helpful.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 10:20 AM on May 22, 2007

Ford Graphics has always been there for me! Ask for Jerry or Phil in the Color Department.

They have a large format printer, but I don't know how wide it prints.
posted by trixie_bee at 10:32 AM on May 22, 2007

I'll second PhotoCraft.
posted by SpecialK at 10:34 AM on May 22, 2007

If you strike out in PDX, Salem Blue down the freeway could do it, looks like. They are a first-class outfit.
posted by Danf at 10:57 AM on May 22, 2007

If Ford doesn't work for you, their arch nemesis, Precision Images is a good alternative. (I used to work for 'em doing large format stuff back in the day... )
posted by ph00dz at 11:53 AM on May 22, 2007

Any "blueprinter" should be able to handle it. The latest Oce equipment can handle this kind of thing in minutes. Heck, we have a slowpoke HP printer in my office that could spit that out in about 10 minutes.

The only tip I have is that you only really need to worry about the 3' dimension, and consider the 5' to be the length. They'll just print it in landscape format. The drawing I'm working off of right this instant is 8' "wide".

Perhaps California is ahead of the curve in this though--actual blueprints are dead here for environmental reasons, and the only way you can get any kind of large-format printing done, even for architectural plans, is via digital scanning.
posted by LionIndex at 2:39 PM on May 22, 2007

Thanks for the recommendations, I ended up going with TIS, who were suggested to me by the folks at PhotoCraft. PhotoCraft wanted $350 to print the PDF into a poster and TIS was around a hundred bucks and way simpler and faster. If they don't do a good job, I'll go with Salem Blue from now on since they're closer to me.
posted by mathowie at 3:42 PM on May 22, 2007