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how many mtrs of print do you get from full set of inks?
Just thought Id ask this question to finish off the week, also I have been having it out with my cadet supplier as when I was buying my cadet plus I was told I would get 100m of full coverage print to 1 full set of 220ml cartridges. (yea right).
Just wondering if any of you cadet owners out there have any idea how many metres of print you are getting from a full set of cartridges(?).
Many thanks in advance.
Dave
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13 Replies
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so much depends on your rip settings and type of coverage look up some of rodny’s posts he does give a figger to work from.
as my machine has 12 carts and i think yours 4 cant comment on amounts
chris
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We’ve been printing some 700x1000mm posters on our cadet today and on checking the ink levels/usage I reckon you would get about 60-70 square metres out of 880ml of ink.
Of course it does all depend heavily on the images you are printing and the rip you are using.
We were printing pretty much full coverage pictures using the MD5 5 year rip at 720 dpi. We used more cyan and magenta than yellow and virtually no black for some reason.
Just as a matter of interest that comes out at less than £4/m².
Hope thats of some use.
Regards
Robert
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Depending on the coverage , you can use 12-20ml per sq meter , work on an average of 15-16 ml , that is for ALL colours. IE total ink usage. Overprinting uses substantially more.
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I went through nearly 2 rolls of vinyl and printing onto normal vinyl as well before new inks, I had to change the lot as I had a problem but ended up with 4 empty cartridges and the waste bottle full, that’s half the ink in the waste bottle!
Worked out at £4.20M, with vinyl, ink and depreciation that works out at around £25.00/M over 3 years.I’ve got the 760mm wide Cadet using Activsol inks.
Steve
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How do you get to the 25 squid a sq meter? It sounds quite high to me- is that what you have worked out is your cost per sq m?
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we guesstimate our expenses on "vinyl" at
£6 : Ink
£2 : Vinylunlaminated per square metre total : £8 labour not included.
OK, so this "might" be a "little" out but i recon there is so much to take into consideration when it comes to digital printing that "isn’t" accounted for. particularly on one offs and short runs. so i always round up…
realistically, i recon if someone hands me a file to print at 1 square metre, with "all" taking into consideration my expenses are £10.
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Robert,
If you reckon on £8 per sq m all in excluding labour – and I don’t disagree with this although I think your vinyl price is a bit low – and your total cost is £10 per sq m, then your machine cost, maintenance, consumables AND labour work out at £2 per sq m.
Is this correct?
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your probably right peter, the vinyl is out a little. maybe another 50p or so onto that. the total of £10 is still not a bad gauge on the labour etc but yeah, when you consider the "Full" shabang we could look at £11-£11.50 for a quality print onto a reputable vinyl at 1 metre square.
i do actually gauge it at £10 on the whole but there you go… we find another cost incurred that we don’t think on.
my personal gripe is that too many sign makers price wrong for digital printing. i know its an endless argument because some folk that price low say "that’s their price" and willing to work at that profit level, while the rest want to "sell up"
personally, i think that’s crap… we all want to work for as much as we possibly can make. we are not serving the trade, so why price that way? simple… many inexperienced sign makers use the pricing of the trade suppliers in the mags as their structure. £14 a square metre etc! 😕our firm makes good profit from cut vinyl. we ventured into digital to ca ter better for our existing customers and to venture into this side of our trade slowly. not to get involved in price wars. 😕
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Heres how we work it
Vinyl GBP 4 per sq meter (5-7 yr stuff) + 25% wasteage = 5 pounds
Ink based on 18ml per sq meter coverage 150per litre = 3 quid
Fixed costs to operate , maintain , program , mind and pay the machine off are approx 75 quid per working day assuming you have a designer and the thing is being financed. One should do around 10 sq meters on a bad day so wack it up to 7.50 per sq meter.
Real cost per sq meter at the worst is 15.50 per sq meter and it comes down a lot if you do more than 10sq m , we work on about 11 quid real cost.Cheapest price I charge per sq meter for raw print is 30 quid on 5+ sq m , then 40 quid for less than that (with a 40 quid minimum charge) then 50 quid for large print and cut and 60 quid for smaller print and simple cut , 70 for less than 4" sq print and cut , 90 for intricate small print and cut. For an overlam on any of these we charge an extra 10 quid except for the intricate stuff that comes to 20 quid.
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The £25.00 that I quoted included the purchase of the Cadet, amount of printing I do and consumable costs over a 3 year period based on the last 6 months.
I’ve since printed nearly every day so the costs will get less than that as more vinyl printed = more profit.You can only base it on your own experience 🙂
By the way that 3 years is based on the printer being scrapped at the end of 3 years, you can’t budget on resale values. I may keep it for years in which case it’ll cost less per Meter.
As I said the actual ink costs so far have been around £4.20/m + vinyl cost at around £2.00/m that’s £6.20/m.
With the experience of the last 6 months behind me I no longer fuck around with the printer as much, I print more and so far the waste bottle has just a little in the bottom so if it carries on like this then the ink cost will be much less.Sorry, just looked back at this and seen what a load of drivel I’ve written, I’m on my second bottle of wine though so have a good weekend all.
Steve
Steve
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Thanks fellas for taking the time to help me out with this topic.
Just for the record I’m using troop v5 Rip and most of my printing is done using uniforms 720dpi profiles as alot of my printing is low height viewing.
we were estimating our cost as £12 per sq metre printing onto MD5 vinyl so by the sounds of the replies we were not that far out.
So Robert (comeonulinnets) you say you should get roughly
60-70sq metres of full coverage print out of 880mil’s of ink?? Interesting.Steve when you say you went through nearly 2 rolls of vinyl before having empty cartridges were the rolls 50m rolls and were the ink cartridges 220ml???
Thanks for the help and advice fellas
Dave
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David,
As I said that was worked out from printing using Troop 5 using MD5 720dpi profile onto gloss paper. (Media shouldn’t affect the amount of ink used only the quality of output). We printed 10 posters at 1000mm x 700mm and averaged about 9.5ml total ink per poster.
Please check my maths (‘cos I have been known to get my numbers muddled), but I think that comes out to about what I said.
Again this was printing pretty much full coverage so the usage should improve if your images have large areas of white in them.
Regards
Robert
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Hi Dave
Yes they were 50m, 30" wide rolls and 220ml cartridges, I’m in the middle of a job that’s going to use 1 – 1½ rolls so I’ll let you know how it does with them.
Basically though I’m really impressed with how little ink it does use
Steve
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