Cost of Printing with PC-60 compared to ?

[Timothy Davis]

OK, just finished printing a full color 22x46 print. Thought I would post this so that others looking at these machines can find out how much it cost to print this way. This print cost me $40 dollars in ribbon refills, used 1 of each cmyk.
There is a little left on each but not enough to start another job. I did not buy this for the above, I bought it to do small stickers and decals, for that it is economical to run.

OK, so my question is, what does it cost to print such a thing on other print cut solutions? Solvent, newer thermals, and anyting else out there.

 

[Outline Graphics]

Duck! LOL I've got the same unit and people don't seem to be too fond of it. It is more expensive from what I understand. I've heard reports from $2.00 - $9.00 per per foot...but who knows. Yours sounds like it was in the range of about 5 bucks or so per square foot.

I'm going to take the time to figure out the printing portion of it real soon though.

 

[Timothy Davis]

Also anyone seeing this that knows were to purchase a new head for self install please hit me up with a private message.

 

[gerald]

The cost of ink would be under 1 dollar on my Mimaki JV3.

 

[Outline Graphics]

I've not been able to find replacement heads either so maybe posting this info here would be helpful for me and anyone else?

 

[Pro Signs & Graphix]

10% of what you paid, for the same print.

 

[Checkers]

Hiya Timothy,
Here's a link to an old discussion about comparing the costs of thermal printing with a couple of machines. The numbers are out of date, but not that far off...
http://www.letterhead.com/ubb-cgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=011201
Now, if you compare thermal material cost to inkjet, there would be a significant difference too, but you're no longer comparing apples to apples. Inkjet should be much cheaper to produce per square foot, but I haven't seen any real numbers comparing the two. And this may be a real issue when you compare operating costs and waste associated with running the two machines. Perhaps someone that runs both can chime in.

Checkers

 

[Fred Weiss]

My cost to run the size described on my Gerber Edge using Oracal 751 and CMYK ribbons from Duracoat would be $14.25. That breaksdown to .66 per foot for the vinyl and .30 per foot for each of the foils.

I would expect that the typical inkjet would come in at around $8.00.

OTOH, I can and do sell that output (as a full color, fully cut graphic) for $150 to $200 reducing my materials cost to less than 10%. Most of the inkjets in my area would sell their output for between $50 and $80 making their cost of materials 10% to 16% with pretty much the same amount of time involved ... thus making their return on their time considerably less.

 

[Pro Signs & Graphix]

OTOH, I can and do sell that output (as a full color, fully cut graphic) for $150 to $200 reducing my materials cost to less than 10%. Most of the inkjets in my area would sell their output for between $50 and $80 making their cost of materials 10% to 16% with pretty much the same amount of time involved ... thus making their return on their time considerably less.

....Which is why the thermals are still a better investment, for the return. I am so glad that you put numbers to it! It seems that nobody is taking the money out of thermal printing, as they have with solvents.

 

[Gino]

The cost of ‘Roland’ ribbons and using CMYK is roughly $2.00 a square foot per ribbon, plus your vinyl. That’s why so many go to CMY. If we don’t have a lot of black we often only use three ribbons.

When you start using after market ribbons, you start having problems. I won’t mention names because they might advertise here, but I can say as long as we stayed with the true ‘Roland’ ribbons… we never had breakage, banding or headaches. It doesn’t make sense to me to save a dollar or two and then have extensive problems that cost you 20X that much or more. Penny Wise – Pound Foolish ???

In my opinion thermal is a much better method and the prices are coming down on the newer machines and they seem to be much more versatile, too. Comparing thermal to inkjet is not a good thing to do. You need to know what type of printing you want to use to serve your customers to the best of your ability.

Go to some trade shows and take some files with you and see if they’ll print them out for you. Or get information at the show and then go to the closest distributor and spend a few hours there asking questions and getting demonstrations. Just keep in mind, they sell/push the machine that makes the most profit for them and has a large follow up of media and inks or foils.

 

[Just Another Sign Guy]

we did have headaches, banding and color inconsistency, with a brand new machine, using only roland consumables.

out of frustration we paid for a roland tech to come to our shop and try to figure out what we may have been doing incorrectly...he was unable to achieve results any better than we were, at the time he told us that they were having many problems and complaints with the machine and he did not see any near term solution to the problems we were experiencing.

our purpose for purchasing the machine was to make small prototypes and samples so as not to have to waste production time on our large format machine, as our workload at the time required us to run the machine 3 shifts per day. obviously this machine was not going to be acheived so we immediately sold the machine and were lucky enough to sell the machine for more than we had spent on it....less the insane amount of money we had spent on cartridges trying to get satisfactory results out of this machine, and spending money to have a tech spend a day with us trying to see if there was anything we could do differently to improve our results.

in my opinion this machines only practical purpos is for the printing of small "stickers" and labels, and as a plotter well, with the speed at which it cuts you'd better not have a very heavy work load or tight deadlines as i think it may actually be faster to cut the material by hand.

i am a great fan of Roland products but in my opinion they missed the mark with this machine for what they presented this machine to be capable of doing versus what it actually could do. it is definitely a blemish on rolands reputation and i have heard many people afraid to purchase new roland technology after being burned by the colorcamm generation of machines. thankfully they really did come out with a professional product this time that truly does have a place in the industry with their new generation of machines.

as your pricing shows it makes it very hard to compete with newer technology if you have customers that are price conscious.