• General Printing Topics

  Are you looking to buy a Digi Printer?

  Posted by Shane Drew on 18 August 2006 at 11:44

  I have been sent this link for a free pdf download and everything technical to do with printers on the market, so you can make an informed choice.

  Might be worth a look http://bigpicture.net/index.php3?opench … laynow=yes

  Les Woods replied 19 years, 2 months ago 3 Members · 6 Replies
• 6 Replies

• 

  Les Woods

  Member

  18 August 2006 at 13:26

  That’s a really interesting link – thanks for that.

  Going on a slight tangent (but still large format based), does anyone have a general formulae for working out large format ink coverage and costing? Like a price per pl (picolitre) or something? Manufacturers normally base it on 5% coverage which, to be honest, is unrealistic since we could all be doing 200% coverage.

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  Shane Drew

  Member

  19 August 2006 at 01:14

  Rodney Gold from Sth Africa on these boards seems to have that figured. He may see this post and comment.

  I use a software product out of the states called ‘Estimate’ and when you set it up, you dial in your costs per litre of whatever, how many passes you are doing etc, and it works out your costs for you.

  Brilliant program.

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  Tony Stanwell

  Member

  19 August 2006 at 07:37

  Good morning Les,
  We use Onyx PosterShop RIP which has an inbuilt calculator for ink usage. You dial in the cost per ml and it does the rest and if you find it does not correspond with the exact usage (which even without this RIP can be very acurately calculated by weighing the cartridges before and after use) you can increase or decrease with the percentage error (-)
  Tony

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  Les Woods

  Member

  19 August 2006 at 09:49

  Cheers Tony, thing is the Canon doesn’t use a rip (we print direct from Photoshop) and guestimating ink useage is quite difficult.

  I saw an Excel spreadsheet once which explained everything but it was based on something like a 25ml cartridge and not a 350ml so couldn’t handle the data (or the width of paper)!

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  Tony Stanwell

  Member

  20 August 2006 at 08:40

  Hi Les,
  Yes it sounds like weighing the cartridges before and after might be your solution…a little tedious but very accurate…do this until you get an idea of usage versus ink coverage etc and you should be able to set up your own table in Excel. Let me know if you need any help setting it up 😛
  Tony

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  Les Woods

  Member

  21 August 2006 at 07:26

  Cheers Tony, I’ll look into that later this week and give you a shout if I get stuck!

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