Cost of ink per square foot - Mimaki JV3-130spII

[ATTTR]

Been trying to nail down pricing for a while now and haven't come up with anything solid. My supervisor came up with .65 cents added to the square ft cost of print vinyl per sq ft, but I KNOW that's been too much and scaring off customers.

Waiting on big boss to approve estimating software that I hope will alleviate this headache, but in the meantime, I need to determine cost for manual quoting.

Here's the lowdown:

I need to calculate (on a full coverage graphic print) the cost of ink per square foot.
Ink used: Mimaki JV3 440 ml, solvent - printing at 720-VarDotdpi- Stochastic.
If my cartridge is $124 per color, how much should I be charging per square foot to quote a job?
I say full coverage because I can't use the estimating in the RIP software if I don't have the job yet, so better to go with 100% coverage... Make sense?

My coworker and I came up with a complicated formula with a result of .15 cent per sq ft, but it makes me nervous that it's so little when I've seen an archive posting that folks were coming up with cost anywhere from .22 to .39 per square ft, and that was 4 years ago! Has ink gotten cheaper?

HELP!!!

Thanks!

 

[eahicks]

Has ink gotten cheaper?

Not really, but printers and their profiles have made ink costs less by utilizing LESS ink than before. So if you track your usage, you will find it to be less in most in cases.

 

[nashvillesigns]

cost per squuare

there are a lot of forum talk about this.
you can square the ink if you use rasterpro 3 and up. it tells you how much ink you used per job.
you square the material you print on.
you add the square for the laminate if needed.

i know how much the printed, laminated, material my shop costs me.



.......its adding all the other expenses that drives me insane.

-Mosher

 

[Marie]

The real cost of Ink

On Mimaki Equipment you can do a system printout that will tell you how many cart. of ink you have used in the life of your machines and how many SQ feet of images produced.
Listed below are the results of my two machines figuring $114.00 per cart of ink (440 size) on both units

Mimaki JV-130 (8 years in operation with 74,453 SF of images) per square foot ink COST was .58 cents.

Mimaki JV33-130 (This is first year of operation with 6060 sq feet of images) per square foot ink COST is .96 cents.

These are Mimaki brand inks

This was rather surprising and is a costly increase that we will be passing on to the customers. I can only think that the increased Quality of prints is the reason for the figures.

I think most all of us do not realize how much we are spending on inks and also on material waste in a job.

MP

 

[the graphics co]

On Mimaki Equipment you can do a system printout that will tell you how many cart. of ink you have used in the life of your machines and how many SQ feet of images produced.
Listed below are the results of my two machines figuring $114.00 per cart of ink (440 size) on both units

Mimaki JV-130 (8 years in operation with 74,453 SF of images) per square foot ink COST was .58 cents.

Mimaki JV33-130 (This is first year of operation with 6060 sq feet of images) per square foot ink COST is .96 cents.

These are Mimaki brand inks

This was rather surprising and is a costly increase that we will be passing on to the customers. I can only think that the increased Quality of prints is the reason for the figures.

I think most all of us do not realize how much we are spending on inks and also on material waste in a job.

MP

That is incredibly high ink costs, if that is accurate you need to make some adjustments or change mfg. for comparison my hpL25500 has $.172/sq.ft. ink cost. on over 50000 sq.ft. of printing.

Just a rough calculation puts your ink cost at $48000 for 50000 sq.ft, compared to $8600 on the HP which is a $39400 difference just in ink cost.

That is a huge difference and you should put some serious consideration and effort into cutting your ink costs by 60-80% as you are throwing away a ton of money.

 

[AF]

The great thing about creating your own profiles is that you can produce a low-ink profile for the run of the muck jobs, and also produce a high-quality profile for the critical jobs where your client is willing to pay the little bit extra for good color.