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

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

mathowie — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:11:29 -0800

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?

By: strangeleftydoublethink

strangeleftydoublethink — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:20:26 -0800

I've used Photo Craft downtown. They were speedy and helpful.

By: trixie_bee

trixie_bee — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:32:44 -0800

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.

By: SpecialK

SpecialK — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:34:21 -0800

I'll second PhotoCraft.

By: Danf

Danf — Tue, 22 May 2007 10:57:19 -0800

If you strike out in PDX, Salem Blue down the freeway could do it, looks like. They are a first-class outfit.

By: ph00dz

ph00dz — Tue, 22 May 2007 11:53:32 -0800

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... )

By: LionIndex

LionIndex — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:39:46 -0800

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.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:42:56 -0800

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.