Makeready / setup waste
The time and throwaway sheets used to get a press aligned and on color before the first sellable copy. It makes short runs expensive.
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What it is
Makeready is everything needed to get a press from idle to saleable sheets: loading plates, feeding and aligning stock, setting ink and water balance, bringing color up, and locking registration. The sheets consumed during that dialing-in are setup waste. They are real paper and ink, but none count toward the finished quantity.
Makeready is why offset printing punishes tiny runs and rewards larger ones. The same plates and setup are needed for 100 good sheets or 10,000, so the fixed cost is brutal at the short end and gets diluted as quantity rises. Digital presses need calibration and test sheets too, but usually far less setup than offset lithography.
Gotcha: setup waste is not the same as finishing spoilage or customer overs. Folding, binding, foil, and die cutting each need extra sheets because later operations spoil some of the good presswork. A quote that lists only press makeready can still underestimate the paper order if those downstream allowances are missing.
Ask AI for it
Build a cost worksheet for this sheet-fed offset lithography job with separate rows for plates, press makeready time, makeready sheets, good run sheets, folding spoilage, binding spoilage, and final delivered quantity. Show fixed setup cost, variable paper and impression cost, total sheets ordered, waste percentage, and unit cost at 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000 copies. Add an HP Indigo digital comparison using the same finished quantities.