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<blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 9645825" data-attributes="member: 6779310">4×? no. 2×, yeah. 3×, not uncommon.Nothing unethical about it.It's just that they budgeted $X amount per purchaser, but, due to the large run, crossed a boundary or two, so the cost dropped from $X to $(X/4) per copy due to that efficiency.Much of it, for offset printing, is just the cost of etching and mounting the plates, including the amortized costs of the equipment to do so, the time a technician has to spend doing it, and the costs of the sheets used as plates. Those are all a 1-time cost per run; if they are stored, it can reduce the costs of a rerun significantly. The tiers of pricing are generally the paper, ink, power, and supervision of the machine in salary, plus an amortized cost per page... but they add the setup cost... On small offset runs, whether mimeographic or intaglio, much of the price per copy is making and setting up&nbsp; the plates... on large runs, that price per plate is divided across way more copies, but the plate just stays put through the run time. This is why the tiers exist. Each tier is based upon them amortizing the setup time per page across the minimum number of copies for that pricing tier. This can, in large enough runs, be up to a factor of 10 difference. In about 1995, I was looking at the price lists for every print shop in South Central Alaska for work... the ones with full press had tiers that usually started at 50 copies, using xerography, then switched to the press at 200 copies, and around 10,000 copies, had dropped by a factor of 6 to 8.... We only needed 300, but got 400, because at 400, the price dropped significantly; it literally was less to go up to 400 copies than to get the 300 we needed, due to the tiers on the printer. These didn't have an inventory tax issue for us, so it was not much risk.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="aramis erak, post: 9645825, member: 6779310"] 4×? no. 2×, yeah. 3×, not uncommon. Nothing unethical about it. It's just that they budgeted $X amount per purchaser, but, due to the large run, crossed a boundary or two, so the cost dropped from $X to $(X/4) per copy due to that efficiency. Much of it, for offset printing, is just the cost of etching and mounting the plates, including the amortized costs of the equipment to do so, the time a technician has to spend doing it, and the costs of the sheets used as plates. Those are all a 1-time cost per run; if they are stored, it can reduce the costs of a rerun significantly. The tiers of pricing are generally the paper, ink, power, and supervision of the machine in salary, plus an amortized cost per page... but they add the setup cost... On small offset runs, whether mimeographic or intaglio, much of the price per copy is making and setting up the plates... on large runs, that price per plate is divided across way more copies, but the plate just stays put through the run time. This is why the tiers exist. Each tier is based upon them amortizing the setup time per page across the minimum number of copies for that pricing tier. This can, in large enough runs, be up to a factor of 10 difference. In about 1995, I was looking at the price lists for every print shop in South Central Alaska for work... the ones with full press had tiers that usually started at 50 copies, using xerography, then switched to the press at 200 copies, and around 10,000 copies, had dropped by a factor of 6 to 8.... We only needed 300, but got 400, because at 400, the price dropped significantly; it literally was less to go up to 400 copies than to get the 300 we needed, due to the tiers on the printer. These didn't have an inventory tax issue for us, so it was not much risk. [/QUOTE]

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