Hey all! I had a customer ask for 100 business cards. I looked around to compare prices. Looking like around $80 something for that many. I printed one….it took 9min 47 seconds😳 that’s over 16 hours for 100 cards!! No way can these people sell them for that cheap if they take that long. I have uploaded a pic of the one I did. Used auto settings for material.
you might try scoring instead of engraving. other smarter folks will chime in shortly 
Not smarter:-) But scoring will improve your time tremendously!!
I thought about that, but when I changed it, it showed the tree as outlined instead of filled in😕 so when I saw that, I changed settings back to engrave. If I print it will it fill in the tree?
Sounds like you were possibly using an HD setting. Try draft or SD to see if you even need the HD setting.
Also, time per unit will be significantly reduced if you do more than one card at a time.
Professional outfits that offer laser engraved cards are using industrial lasers that are much faster and bigger. GF is an awesome creative tool but not that.
Try lowering your LPI .
As many have said - definitely not higher than 270, and at that size 195 is probably fine. Yes scoring will outline not fill, but a combo of score and defocused score could do all the letters and probably even the tree…you’d need to spend more time on the art so just try lowering the LPI first 
and focus on customers who are looking for the personal touch and NOT trying to compare you with bulk business. You should definitely be charging more than .80 cents per card.
You could also change the LPI as discussed above and ‘just’ engrave the tree and try to score the rest of it “Wortman Tree Service”, etc. That’s taking some time as well…it would cut your time probably in half.
Great discussion, everyone! I’ve moved this thread to Everything Else so the discussion can continue there.
As others have suggested, lowering your LPI will decrease the engrave time. Every material has a maximum effective LPI - engraving higher than that limit just increases time without a quality (resolution) increase. In my experience, the only materials that benefit from high LPI settings are tile, slate, and anodized aluminum. Other users will disagree, but this is what 4+ years of testing has shown me. 
Testing is the key to optimizing any design – The tree is the challenging part of this design, so work on it until you get acceptable times and quality:
Test on the target material.
If it’s too blockly, increase the LPI one step and retest.
If it’s too burnt, decrease power by 10% and retest.
Once you’re happy, try a full card (yes, I’d score everything except the tree and the block text). If that’s ok, set up your full page.
One caution – Full speed engraving decreases the maximum width possible, so you might not get as many cards per horizontal row as you expect. The question becomes is the marginal material waste better or worse than the time savings.
Good Luck!
I will definitely try all of these suggestions! Also, I noticed on a video that everyone’s LPI showed in inches…mine is showing cm!!! I have no idea how to change that but no wonder all my projects were taking forever! Thanks so much everyone!
Thank you!!!
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