Ink Usage

[pisquee]

We've just in the middle of a large cushion run, so I took a batch of the print job, weighed the ink cartridges before and after to calculate ink usage for the job.

This is using an Epson 9600 on Enhanced Matte paper setting, high speed. Using InkTec's Sublinova (DTI) Ink.

Each of our cushions uses a transfer 1 metre wide, and 50 cm high (so a half square metre) and are printed full colour bleed edge to edge, so total ink coverage for the transfer.

We used a run of 35 cushions from the batch, so 17.5 square metres

The ink usage in grams was as follows:

	Before	After	Colour Usage
Yellow:	484	438	46
Light Magenta:	493	442	51
Light Cyan:	499	444	55
Magenta:	530	487	43
Cyan	513	400	113
Light Black:	515	486	29
Black:	513	468	45
TOTAL	3547	3165	382

So, in total 382 grams of ink

I took an average weight of 3 full (unopened) litres of ink I had in stock (which were all different weights) and got an average of 1079.333g for a litre of ink (factoring in the 103g for the bottle itself)

So, 1 ml of ink is equal to 1.079333 grams

So, for 17.5 square metres, we used 412.3053 ml of ink

Which comes down to 23.56 ml per metre

(happy to be corrected if I got some of my calculations wrong!)

[GoonerGary]

35 cushions for about £30 worth of ink?

[ArferMo]

Plus the transfer paper, electric, time, wear and tear..... ummm expensive production costs.

[logobear]

i suspect an error, - 382 grams - that's nearly a pound in old weights, - that is way too much .... me things for 35 cushions ? - but what do i know!
it's a lot of liquid to evaporate off...

[ArferMo]

Just printed several square meters of wide format media in the last 5 hours looked at the actual usage and calculated what I would have used if I continued to print 35 square meters and it worked out at 240cc

[pisquee]

Got some of my maths wrong, which gets it down to 20.22 ml of ink per square metre.

@ArferMo - 35 cushions is isn't 35 square metres, as each cushion is half a square metre of fabric (50cm x 1 metre)
- in terms of expensive production costs, we are dealers for InkTec, so get the inks and transfer paper at trade price not RRP
- our costs for print, cut and sew cushions work out better than buying in blank sublimation cushions to print on
@logobear - the scales are probably not accurate enough for this to be scientifically accurate
@GoonerGary - no, our ink costs a lot less than that!

I think if we using Sawgrass consumer inks, with their £60 for 100ml or whatever Artanium costs, then the ink per square metre costs would be silly