Color Copies / Color Printing

Color copies are high quality and affordable at any quantity thanks to major advances in digital printing technology. Your price will depend on the number of originals, quantity and paper type. Our best price break for color printing is 25,000 copies of 1 original on 20/50# Bond at just 5¢ each.

Enter your job details on the calculator to see your custom color printing prices.

Color copies are sheets of paper printed in color on high-quality digital presses. Digital color printing uses toner instead of ink, which decreases the cost substantially for small to mid-volume print runs compared to offset printing. Our color copies cost just pennies a piece and are produced on flagship, state-of-the-art machines. This gives you high-quality color printing at the lowest price possible.

For the best color printing quality, we suggest glossy paper, which is available in a variety of text and cover weights.

Professional printing companies are all charged a 'click rate' by their suppliers. This is the cost they are charged for each sheet passed through the machine (per printed side) to cover maintenance and other terms of their contracts.

Companies like DocuCopies.com, who are printing hundreds of thousands of sheets per day or more, are able to negotiate a much lower click rate than local walk-in copy shops because of the volume. This means we can charge you less.

Sometimes you need printing fast or even same-day printing. While we do offer Rush Services as fast as next-day delivery, we know sometimes going local for color copies near you is unavoidable. But if you're printing any serious color volume and have a day or more to wait for delivery, searching for 'color copies near me' will almost always cost you more than color printing at DocuCopies.com.

A bleed is when printing extends to the edge of the finished sheet. By default, digital printing leaves 0.25" blank margins around the edge. To print to the edge, the file must be setup in a special way so that the printers can print it slightly larger than the finish size. The copies are then trimmed to remove the extra print and white space, leaving you with borderless color prints.

Because of the larger paper and additional finishing involved, bleed printing does add cost to the copy price. If you're trying to keep your costs as low as possible and don't mind the white borders, avoid printing with bleeds. But if your design only looks right printing to the edge, make sure your files are setup correctly and choose 'Bleeds: Yes, print to edge.'

Bleed Setup Guide

Under normal conditions, color printing usually takes 2-4 days for production plus shipping. If you add bleeds, folding or any other finishing options, this typically adds 1 day for production.

Please note, these are only estimates. Industry conditions (delays and shortages in supply chains, Holiday shipping seasons, etc.) may affect these estimates. Up-to-date estimates will be shown in your shopping cart.

Rush delivery is available! Place your item(s) in your shopping cart, select your billing and enter shipping information to see the estimated delivery times, rush options and prices.

To avoid any showthrough whatsoever from one side to the other, we recommend the 32/80# Text (gloss or smooth).

If you want to keep the costs lower, most people are happy with the 28/70# Text Smooth. This is a mid-weight paper and has minimal show-through, which is much less noticeable if both sides have roughly equal amounts of coverage.

The biggest key to our cheap color copies and color printing service is volume. A typical walk-in copy shop is lucky to print a few hundred copies in a given business day. But because we're regularly printing in the hundreds of thousands, we're able to negotiate ultra-low click rates (the cost we're charged to pass a sheet through a digital press) from our vendors, which allows us to slash prices for copies and other color printing services.

We do have a formula for saving money if one side is black and white / grayscale. This does not come into play if your quantity is less than approximately 3,000. For a custom printing quote, please enter your job details in the calculator as Full Color, then click Custom Quote Request and enter your request. We will price out your custom color printing quote and get back to you.

You want to leave a strong first impression, but you don't need to go overboard. We suggest the 32/80# Text Smooth if you're printing color copies for your resume, business proposals or anything else that requires gaining the confidence of your audience.

For a complete list of our paper types and suggested uses, check out our paper catalog.