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

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 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.

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.