Ink cost per square foot/ Mimaki JFX 500

[JohnBoy1972]

Hi, this is John, we just got a brand new Mimaki JFX 500 at my job and I'm in charge of it... O boy... lol I am really excited/scared of this machine. I need to figure out a cost basis per square foot so we can bid some large square footage jobs. Anyone have any ideas on how to go about that would be greatly appreciated.

 

[BigfishDM]

How much do your inks cost you?

 

[Solventinkjet]

It's going to depend on a few factors like resolution and other profile settings. In general a good cost to go by is 15 - 30 cents per square foot. 15 for low coverage prints which lots of ink free area and up to 30 cents for full coverage. If you print at a super high resolution like 1200 x 1200 it might go over 30 cents but in reality most people don't print at that resolution.

 

[ColorCrest]

Hi, this is John, we just got a brand new Mimaki JFX 500 at my job and I'm in charge of it... O boy... lol I am really excited/scared of this machine. I need to figure out a cost basis per square foot so we can bid some large square footage jobs. Anyone have any ideas on how to go about that would be greatly appreciated.

Whomever was responsible for acquiring such an investment as this machine should have the ink costs per square foot readily available to you or they have already determined the ink cost was not significant enough to impact bids.

Are you in charge of other important factors for calculating costs?

 

[ColorCrest]

It's going to depend on a few factors like resolution and other profile settings

Contrary to myth, printing at higher resolutions do not use any more ink than others except in the case of a specific "draft" mode.

A proper profile is designed to print specific color results at their individual resolution modes. Meaning, all the typical print resolutions should match one another. If a higher resolution such as 1200x1200 laid down more ink than 600x600, the color result would be darker and therefore be incorrect. Users often make the mistake of using a given print mode profile with a different resolution than what is was created for. They might see a darker higher resolution print and mistakingly believe all higher resolutions will consume more ink. In fact it did use more ink because they didn't use the proper profile. When they use the correct profile, the higher resolution will consume the same ink as the lower resolution print. That is part of the profile's job, to help make images match and the effect is usually readily viewable in the RIP preview while switching between resolutions.

 

[Solventinkjet]

Contrary to myth, printing at higher resolutions do not use any more ink than others except in the case of a specific "draft" mode.

A proper profile is designed to print specific color results at their individual resolution modes. Meaning, all the typical print resolutions should match one another. If a higher resolution such as 1200x1200 laid down more ink than 600x600, the color result would be darker and therefore be incorrect. Users often make the mistake of using a given print mode profile with a different resolution than what is was created for. They might see a darker higher resolution print and mistakingly believe all higher resolutions will consume more ink. In fact it did use more ink because they didn't use the proper profile. When they use the correct profile, the higher resolution will consume the same ink as the lower resolution print. That is part of the profile's job, to help make images match and the effect is usually readily viewable in the RIP preview while switching between resolutions.

Interesting. Lets say, just to make is simple, that a head only fires 1 dot size of 10 picoliters. If you print 720 dots that is 7200 picoliters of ink. If you print 1440 that would be 14400 or double the amount of ink. How does the profile change the ink consumption? Does it have to do with ink limits? Honestly I have never thought about how that particular facet works.

 

[ColorCrest]

How does the profile change the ink consumption?

For example; a medium gray is a particular color the profiles has as a target. The ICC profiling process recognizes the swatch as too dark and therefore compensates by holding back ink to deliver the proper medium gray. Again, one should be able to see the obvious effect in a RIP preview because it really is half or double an ink load. If an ICC workflow is not being used for whatever reason, specific calibration curves would need to be created as the compensation.

 

[AKwrapguy]

Hi, this is John, we just got a brand new Mimaki JFX 500 at my job and I'm in charge of it... O boy... lol I am really excited/scared of this machine. I need to figure out a cost basis per square foot so we can bid some large square footage jobs. Anyone have any ideas on how to go about that would be greatly appreciated.

You ink cost is going to be the cost of your ink divided by the amount of ink. So with my HP lets say I get 3 liters of ink for $300.

My unit of measure is going to be Milliliters. So 3000 mL = 3 liters

So now we can divide the $300 by 3000 and get $0.1 cost per mL.

So now if you print a job that takes X amount of ink, multiply it by the cost and you have figured out cost of ink per job. For example I just printed two side decals for a box truck and I used 45.6 mL of ink for each side and 33 sqft of material. So each side cost my about $0.46 cents in ink.

As far as figuring out cost per sqft that's a little different as ink is coverage is inconsistent. So you could take the amount of ink used and the sqft used to get a sqft price. However 'in theory' if you were to do a several different jobs with a range of ink coverage, and you might be able to create a 'medium or average' ink used and translate that into an average cost per sqft for estimating, but I wouldn't take it to the bank.