Mousemats?

[Kaz]

Graeme

I think those figures have been provided by sawgrass at some point, based on this info page

http://www.sawgrassink.com/v.php?pg=734

But if you can get clarification, that would be great

[Andrew]

Graeme - I have heard so many varied ink printing costs over the years I think the only accurate way to find out is to do it yourself like your customer did. Like you mentioned, different printers and software settings etc can make a big difference. Some of the rip software for the wide format printers actually tells you the exact amount of ink used per print. How accurate that is I don't yet know.

[JSR]

Although I can't answer for the Ricoh printers, when I first bought my R1800 some years ago, I ran a spreadsheet that logged the amount of ink used against the size of photo printed. The amount of ink used was taken from when a cartridge was replaced, and the size of the photos were reduced to a calculation of square mms. Area of coverage was then divided into capacity of ink used to calculate the amount of ink used on any particular size of print.

Over the course of several months, the conclusion reached was that an A4 photo (borderless) used just over 1ml of ink on average. Borderless printing forces overspray from the printer, suggesting that an edge-to-edge A4 without overspray would use to the tune of 1ml of ink. Photos may vary between light coverage and heavy coverage but 1ml looked like a good average.

At the same time as doing this, a fellow R1800 owner living on the other side of the world was doing a similar test. His result generally suggested the same 1ml per A4.

These were "real world" tests and so the quantity of ink consumed included any required head cleans and ink purged every time a cartridge was changed. Using a CISS would reduce this waste and so would slightly reduce the amount of ink used. The test ran over several months to level off the excess ink "wasted" when a new printer consumes a certain amount of ink on its first install.

Given this information, I generally work out my ink costs using this same "1ml = A4" rule of thumb. A typical mousemat covers about 80% of an A4 sheet (with bleed), and so the cost of ink for a mousemat would be 0.8ml on average.

If the ink costs £52 for 125ml, then the cost of 1ml is 42p. The cost of 0.8ml is, therefore, 33p, so that's the ink cost per mousemat. If doing a large run of light or heavy ink coverage, you'd need to factor that into your costs. My calculations are purely based on averages.

Paper cost needs adding to ink costs - around 14p per sheet of TexPrint - making a grand total of 47p (55p inc VAT) per mousemat.

I suspect that the figure provided earlier in the thread of 35p (41p inc VAT) is a touch too low, but I would expect the true figure to be somewhere between that one and my one (because my calculations err on the side of caution).

Whether other printers use the same ink coverage (1ml per A4) is something someone else needs to work out. The R1800 was a CMYKKRB+GOP printer and we tend to use CMYK or CcMmYK in dye-sub.

As always, YMMV.

[Flash]

Another great comprehensive post JSR, thank you.
I have been trying to work out the most cost effective method of printing mousemats as it appears that mousemats that can be dye-sub printed can also be printed with a transfer paper.
I have not done the costings on ink consumption, but you have ;) which helps!
I know I can purchase a sheet of transfer paper for 'lights' for about 40p now I would print this with dye based ink which is in a CISS currently on an Epson SX200 All In One Printer.
I also know that dye based ink is significantly cheaper than dye Sub ink.
Now I have your calculations I should be able to find my answer with a calculator.

Phil

[Andrew]

Phil - as far as I know or can remember the transfer print onto mousemat is not the hard wearing as it on the surface rather than becoming part of it. Might need to do a bit of research on that as well.

Thanks for the extra info JSR