Vertical banding in gradient

Question

The printer is telling me there are vertical bands in the gradient on this brochure. I exported the document to a PDF-High Quality (modified) preset;Standard: None;Compatibility: Acrobat 5 (PDF 1.4) (printer's specs).
The color settings:
North America Prepress2;
Working Spaces: R=Adobe RGB, K=US Web Coated      (SWOP) v2 with Policies set to: R=Preserve Embedded Profiles; K=Preserve      Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles).
The Transparency Blend Space is      RBG.
The color I used to make the gradient has 17% transparency.
HELP! How to get rid of this??
I'm working in InDesign CS4.
Thanks!
Kimberlee

Answer 1

Unless you're printing hundreds, it will be digital. The cost of making plates for color work is high when you go on a press, so you need a lot of copies before that gets absorbed into the per unit cost of the finished product and can compete with the click charges for running the laser printer, which needs no plates and has practically no setup time for each job.
For a job run on my favorite printer's press I usually figure the minimum charge is $1500 (and that would cover any number of impressions up to around 500 copies). As the number of copies increases, the cost for paper, ink, and press time go up, but the very heavy cost of the plates and job setup gets sliced into smaller and smaller chunks until eventually you are paying only pennies per unit (or fractions of a penny). On the other hand, the color copier has a constant cost per page that is I think around $.25 each, whether you print one or one thousand. The setup cost is minimal (I don't know what my guy charges, but where I used to work, we charged $15 per file, and I think that is considered high these days, but it depends a lot on how hard they work on getting the color right).
I just got a quote this afternoon to print 2000 booklets in two colors, 16 pages plus cover, finished size 5.5 x 8.5 after folding and stapling. This is a perfect configuration for the laser printer which can do the finishing inline and spit out a finished booklet that needs no additional handling. It will cost about $3200.00 to run on the press, then trim, fold and stitch, but running it on the copier would be $6000.00. If I add another thousand coppies to the press run it will add perhaps another hundred or two hundred dollars, adding them to the copier run would probably add $2000.00 to $2500.00. On the other hand, if I only needed 50 copies, the digital print price would allow me to consider color where I never would have been able to do it ten years ago.
Peter