I decided to get some business cards made. I produced the design in Inkscape according to Vistaprint’s specification:
A nice shade of red I thought. Unfortunately, Vistaprint can’t print red:
I included a few red and different colour items in the photo for comparison. I was a bit surprised at this as I had followed all the suggestions on the Vistaprint web site, and indeed the site itself seemed to render red correctly:
I contacted them and they kindly offered to try again. I sent them a few samples of the first lot so they could see the problem. The second batch turned up, and it was a slightly darker brown that the first. I contacted them again, and got this interesting response:
We currently do not have persons in place to check orders before they are printed nor shipped.
So they just press print and hope everything turns out okay.
They suggested I try converting the colour to CMYK, so I did. Sent them another proof, which again looked perfect on the web site preview. Third lot of cards turned up and sure enough they are still just as brown.
FFS Vistaprint, is it that hard to print red? Every cheap inkjet can do it, so why can’t you? How can your prints be so far from what is shown on screen? I can understand not being able to match colour to a professional level but we are talking completely different parts of the spectrum here.
FAIL.