Customer Reviews

Avery Linen-Textured Two-Side Clean Edge Business Cards for Inkjet Printers, White, Pack of 200 (08873)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I wanted to make business cards at home, that looked and felt good, and that would allow a great color photo picture to be used on the card with my information. I selected the Avery Linen-Textured Two-Side Clean Edge Business Cards for Inkjet Printers, Matte, White, Pack of 200 (08873) - and after working with templates and WORD to design my card, I've been really happy with the results.

My cards are full color, one sided (even though you can print on both sides of these). The "linen" texture is only on one side, but if you print a nice color picture on the texture side with your business/contact information (my card has a color picture that fills the whole card space) then leaving the back white actually makes the card look even sharper, in my opinion.

I tried to print my high quality photo (with information) on these cards using a laser printer, an HP Color LaserJet 1600 Printer, and I was not happy with the photo quality on these cards (or on any stock for that matter). So, I am using a color photo inkjet now, and I'm really happy with the results. My inkjet is not too fancy, a Canon PIXMA iP6220D Photo Printer, but the results look really nice. I use the highest quality photo print setting, and I tell it that this paper is "matte photo paper" and it all works!

The laser perforated edges on all four sides of the cards snap away cleanly. You don't rip or cut or tear these cards apart, you print them, and snap them apart. This worked much better than I would have imagined. You can not see the that these were snapped apart - the final product looks great.

Why not 5 stars then? I wish these were just a tad heavier. They are not cheap or flimsy as some reviewers suggest, but they are not as stiff (thick) as some cards. Maybe if they were thicker, they might not print as well in the low-end photo printers.

I convinced people that I could make business cards for them, and invested in the software and paper. Software worked outstanding, but this paper looked little better than standard copier bond. The thickness is minimal, and the texture is just on one side. I invested in Avery's most expensive product and it came up very short. They need to do much better.

Avery is living on its reputation, and like other companies that try this, their reputation is going down fast...

Cards can only be printed one side (no indication of this on box or in literature); also, they had problems w/ink spotting (not printer related).

I've used these cards for a while now and like them a lot.

The print quality is good, although I think a lot of this has to do with the quality of printer you use. I am using a Canon Pixma MP620 and I am printing only black & white one sided. The linen texture is not pronounced enough to interfere with printing, at least of simple graphics. The thickness of the card is perhaps a little thinner than professional cards but not a lot. They are stiff and rigid like a professional business card would be.

For me the best part is that I can create my own card layout--and I can change it as much as I like. Unlike professional services that require a purchase of 500 or so, I can print 10 at a time--or even one! I can print a sheet of all the same design, or a different design on every card on the sheet.

I highly recommend buyers download the free Avery Design Pro software--Microsoft attempts to copy Avery's templates but they always are a little off and you will experience 'creep' in the alignment of the card and printing if you try to use MS Word instead of Avery's software. The Avery software is free and available in both mac and PC formats. Much like MS Powerpoint, the Avery software has 'preset' templates with text boxes and graphics that require little manipulation--or you can delete it all and design your own from scratch! Be aware that when purchasing two-sided products like this, the preset templates will also be two-sided so be sure to choose the 'back of sheet' feature to preview, modify, or delete any backside graphics before printing (or you'll end up with an entire sheet of INSERT NAME HERE cards).

Very impressed with the quality. Those given cards commented on how much they looked like professionally produced business cards.

The reviews indicating ink bleeding and texture on only one side are likely for an old version of the product. My ink jet (Canon Pixma MP970) produced very clear and fine fonts in color. The cards are textured on both sides and can be printed on both sides.

This is a great product. Many of the previous reviews refer to the older product. The current 8873 works great, is textured on both sides and with a good printer, prints on both sides. For the best results DO NOT use MSWord. As usual, Word has bugs (which are the cause of most of the formating problems other reviewers mentioned), and some of them show up when using the Avery templates (mail merge is one of them). Instead, download Avery's free software, DesignPro (unfortunately this does NOT work with Vista 64 bit, but does with other Vista versions), from Avery...
http://www.avery.com/avery/en_us/Templates-%26-Software
You'll find templates for all of their products, plus a custom design mode that allows you to build projects from the ground up if you can't find a template you like.

I used these labels for my wedding placecards. They're perfectly sized, separate easily, and do indeed separate with nice clean edges. I had two issues with the Avery template for MS Word, however.

For one thing, I didn't notice the note in the top right corner of the Avery packaging that tells you to use a different Microsoft template number other than 8871, which is the product number for this specific product. So I wasted some time searching for the Avery 8871 template in MS Word and on the Avery website.

When I finally figured out that I just had to select a different template number in Word, I laid out my design, did a mail merge using my guest name and table number info from Excel (which also took me awhile to figure out), and did a test print on regular paper. Everything looked fine, even when I held it behind one of the Avery sheets to make sure that the alignment was correct. However, starting with the 3rd sheet and on the remaining 13 sheets that I printed, I was incredibly dismayed to see that the content on the last 3 rows of cards shifted up so that part of my content was printed on the row above, if that makes any sense.

This issue could probably be avoided if you a) don't have your design laid out too close to the edge and b) follow the instructions to feed only one sheet at a time. I'm not sure if that would fix the issue, but at least you could see it coming and take care of it on the subsequent sheet. I was in a crunch and didn't have time to feed the sheets one at a time, or have time to print do-overs on the other side, since it's a 2-sided product.

So, four stars for the quality and look of the cards themselves (although I think they're a bit thin for use as a business card, but perfect for a placecard) and minus one star for my template and alignment issues.

It had been years since I first printed on Avery business cards. Back then, those cards would show the perforations. And, it had no special finishes to make them look professional. So, they basically looked like something cheap that I printed at home - which they were but... this made them useless to me.

Now, I needed to generate some personal business cards, and noticed the upgrades - No perforations... really? Photo quality... yes? Print on both sides... ok. And also a linen texture ... for inkjets??? Ok, I'll try it again.

I'm glad I did. These cards are fantastic!!

I printed them on my HP Deskjet 3127 printer in normal mode. They printed out sharp and bright - the text leaps off the pages. The photos and graphics looks a little muted which makes a nice artistic contrast with the text. The linen look looks great! (Which for me is better as I did not have to waste the ink to make the background look more unique.) And, best of all, there are no perforations at all. (I did not try printing on the back yet, but it seems that it would work fine.) So, this is exactly what I was looking for - business cards in lots of 10, not 200 - and updateable and customizable at home!

My only bugger - and this has been for years and with all Avery products - is that I used to be able to choose a template and just use it. But, nowadays I have to tweak the margins and the size of the squares on printed page for the template until it lands in the outline of the squares. I'm sure that this is a departure from the Avery - HP - Microsoft alignment that they used to have, but it is a pain. Once done the first time, of course, everything is good. As an update, Avery's label software helps a lot too.

I'm not sure why others ran into problems. These are high quality cards that make great, professional looking prints. I'm using the most common printer brand, HP. They probably expected this, and this appears to be what the labels were designed for. Mine worked great out of the box.

If anything, I'd say that Avery quality has improved and is even better than what it used to be - with more options and higher end features.

The labels are super!

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As an update, I downloaded, installed, and started using the Avery Wizard and bought a different printer (Canon all in one). Since then, I have not have any problems with lining up labels and business cards with the partition. Not sure if the problem was the printer or MS Office, but it wasn't the fault of the labels themselves.

Overall, this is a good product. I especially liked that it was easy to separate the business cards from the sheet with clear separation and not really fuzzy edges. There were quite a few templates available online, but I opted to use the Microsoft Word template. Formatting so that the spacing on the edges looked nice required some work and trial/error, but these business cards printed out well at the end.

This is a waste of time for card designs that need centering. The templates are completely useless. I wasted hours trying to get them to line up on while copier paper, so I don't waste the Avery. The template I used was for Photoshop. I'm good with Photoshop so it wasn't me, it was the template. I tried the word version template also thinking maybe it's easier, it's more useless. The paper quality is good and looks similar to the professionally printed stack - that's why it's getting 2 stars instead of 1. I would recommend this only if you don't need to center your design, or you'll hate it.