anyone know roughly what ink costs per sq. ft.?

[gabagoo]

Mimaki jv3 -130 spII oem cartridges.

Anybody hazard a guess generally what it costs to run ink per sq ft at 720 x 720.
Just a ballpark idea? .20? .45?
I know some rips tell you how much is being used, but mine does not.

 

[Techman]

mor elike a few ml per ft. how much is yoru ink per ml and times that by the 4 colors times that by a 3 ml / ft/

it isn't much

 

[Mosh]

I figured Roland ink on average is $.25 high quality, less for banner printed high speed.

 

[Letterbox Mike]

We estimate OEM Mimaki ink at $.25-$.28 p.s.f. on average, but your average will vary depending on what you're printing most of and how much ink coverage.

 

[MikePro]

i assume $0.27, not including anything your printer is wasting during cleanings, at full color print.

(for some reason my onyx v.10 doesn't calculate ink usage anymore, so I found this manually via how many 440cc cartridges @ stock msrp $120 per cartridge that I had burned on some recent large full-print projects.)

 

[ChiknNutz]

The ROT I used was Cost per Liter / 1000. That was for my 4-color Roland. YMMV for a 6 or 8 color machine. I forget exactly how I came up with it or if someone else gave me the notion.

 

[petesign]

I figure mine at about $.50 a sq/ft -- it might actually only cost me 30 cents, but screw one thing up, and guess what, it costs 60.. and for some reason, it seems like every customer I get these days wants a 4x8 banner, with a black background, or dark navy blue with little white letters.. And with my laminator... well. you get the idea.

 

[MikePro]

wait, gabagoo.... you're from Canada!

so lets just say.... $2.52 CAD per sq.meter, eh?

 

[john1]

Mines about $.36 psf, i get each 220 ink on my Roland for $80 with shipping

 

[gabagoo]

wait, gabagoo.... you're from Canada!

so lets just say.... $2.52 CAD per sq.meter, eh?

lol so true!!!!! even with Canadian $$ roughly at par we still get hosed. woohooo!!!!!!!

 

[dasnootz]

$0.35 here.

 

[skdave]

Rolands .45 a square foot 100% coverage.

 

[CentralSigns]

220 cc is $89 OEM Ink, thats $.41 a cc. Stickers 1cc per sq ft, printed sign face 1.25 cc per sq ft . Costs $0.50 per sq ft on a Roland SP300i. If you buy 440cc cartridges thats cheaper at $0.31 per square ft based on $138 per cartridge. I think if you estimate about 18% more you capture the best quality setting. That's $0.37 per square foot. That's all based on the math being right.

 

[kkamauu]

our cost on our JV3 was $0.46 with high resolution. obviously it depends on the resolution, passes... we use onyx so it gives us the amount of ink used.

 

[Vinylman]

I am running a Mimaki JV 33 and using that printer running through raster link version 3 after I print any file I right click on the file, which opens a job properties menu. Go to the second tab "results" and click on it. This will give you a complete readout as to every ink, how much you used. The time it took to print, what your image size was and the entire binary code. Using that information you can quite readily see that most of your files are Using anywhere from 2.5 mL total ink to upwards of 20 or 30 mL.

If you know how much you are spending per milliliter for ink, you can begin to chart your cost per square foot of printed area. the use of simple mathematics will give you your cost per square foot.
I hope this helps you little bit if you're using the raster link program along with your Mimaki.

 

[Vinylman]

Ink Cost Example

Okay, here is a real-life example project I just did.
image size was 50" x 20". For this example we'll assume that this would represent 8 ft.²

currently I am using echo solvent OEM ink's from Mimaki, they are costing me $109 per 440 mL container.

This particular print job used 7.651 cc of ink total. it had a black-and-white checkerboard border all the way around the outside with a photo running down the middle and a bright yellow background.

Using simple math formulation My ink cost .2477 cents per cc.
I multiply that times 7.651 cc of ink use and that equals $1.89 1/2 cents for this print.
And that gives me a grand total of 23.68 cents per square foot net cost for my ink use on this project.
I hope that helps, have a great day!

 

[Tim Aucoin]

On the Roland, I've been averaging between $0.30 & $0.45 PSF on solid coverage. I'm in the midst of switching to Lyson inks which will cost me a lot less than OEM, so these numbers will drop significantly I imagine.