Ink Estimation WAY Wrong

[Mack2D2]

So, I ran an ink estimate in Flexi production manager to break down cost of some 28' banners for my boss... and now I'm realizing, after printing a couple of the banners, that the ink estimate inside Flexi was wayyyy off. I know I've got it set to the same icc profile for the estimate as I print the final item on but we're talking ridiculous levels of inaccuracy here. I've attached an image where I was screen grabbing the ink volumes from ValueJet Status Monitor which I know isn't an incredibly accurate way to measure current ink level but it's the only way I know of right now... anyway, I put a little graph line setup over it to estimate by counts of 10 regarding how many ml of ink is present before and after the print... and it looks like an estimate of 15ml was off by 75ml which is gargantuan. Can anyone tell me why this would be happening? Trying not to use hundreds of dollars of ink on in-house banners for some big wall space... any advice is greatly appreciated.

LINK TO IMAGE SHOWING INK TRACKING:
https://usabusinesschoice.egnyte.com/dl/aMjBsi5Qs5

 

[Solventinkjet]

It's better to just go by the old rule of thumb of $0.30 per sq ft. It's usually going to be higher than your actual cost depending on coverage. If it's a banner that is completely covered you might move it up to $0.35 per sq. ft.

In your case, the Mutoh ink levels, as you said, are not very accurate. In Flexi it's making a prediction based off the file and the profile. The printer however, calculates ink usage based on it's own firmware. So they are usually going to disagree. That being said, make sure your printer isn't doing cleanings during the print. That would throw off ink levels like this for sure. You would have to take into account the ink that gets used up during the cleaning as well. Normally you don't need to have it clean during the prints. It's a seldom used feature but gets turned on by accident a lot.

 

[Mack2D2]

It's better to just go by the old rule of thumb of $0.30 per sq ft. It's usually going to be higher than your actual cost depending on coverage. If it's a banner that is completely covered you might move it up to $0.35 per sq. ft.

In your case, the Mutoh ink levels, as you said, are not very accurate. In Flexi it's making a prediction based off the file and the profile. The printer however, calculates ink usage based on it's own firmware. So they are usually going to disagree. That being said, make sure your printer isn't doing cleanings during the print. That would throw off ink levels like this for sure. You would have to take into account the ink that gets used up during the cleaning as well. Normally you don't need to have it clean during the prints. It's a seldom used feature but gets turned on by accident a lot.

crazy to me that they would even bother putting ink estimation in the software if it's so far off... ink estimator was 15ml for magenta but it ended up at 90ml... this is going to put me in hot water as I estimated cost on 16 of these 28'x10' banners and now I'm going to have to deliver the news that it's over $100 of ink per banner instead of the initial $30'ish. I do have it set so it doesn't clean mid-print, thank you for the feedback. Hoping now that someone may have a way to setup ink estimate so it's at least a tiny bit accurate, this is a huge discrepancy.

 

[Solventinkjet]

crazy to me that they would even bother putting ink estimation in the software if it's so far off... ink estimator was 15ml for magenta but it ended up at 90ml... this is going to put me in hot water as I estimated cost on 16 of these 28'x10' banners and now I'm going to have to deliver the news that it's over $100 of ink per banner instead of the initial $30'ish. I do have it set so it doesn't clean mid-print, thank you for the feedback. Hoping now that someone may have a way to setup ink estimate so it's at least a tiny bit accurate, this is a huge discrepancy.

The clean mid print is probably the issue. Also, make sure your cleaning settings are set to Economy!

 

[Mack2D2]

The clean mid print is probably the issue. Also, make sure your cleaning settings are set to Economy!

just to be sure I'm setting things right... I can't seem to find it in the settings but I've been paying attention to the printer and it doesn't seem to be taking any brief breaks to clean mid-print, so I'm pretty sure that setting is off, but do you happen to know where I'd find that in the settings to confirm it's off? I've gone into menu > setup > auto cleaning and I've turned off "before print" and "printing time" while "waiting time" is set to 720min. The mutoh valuejet 1624x doesn't seem to have "economy" cleaning but it has short, medium and long... I've always used short which I'm assuming is same as "economy".

 

[greysquirrel]

crazy to me that they would even bother putting ink estimation in the software if it's so far off... ink estimator was 15ml for magenta but it ended up at 90ml... this is going to put me in hot water as I estimated cost on 16 of these 28'x10' banners and now I'm going to have to deliver the news that it's over $100 of ink per banner instead of the initial $30'ish. I do have it set so it doesn't clean mid-print, thank you for the feedback. Hoping now that someone may have a way to setup ink estimate so it's at least a tiny bit accurate, this is a huge discrepancy.

At $.30 per banner that would be full coverage...it would be $84ea. if the file has a lot of black, change the values to 20,20,20,100...anything more is overkill anyway...

 

[greysquirrel]

besides, Roland and Mutoh's do not calculate ink properly...the smart chips on those cartridges are actually dumb...HP is pretty accurate if you use their phone app for the printers...does not work through onyx.