Managing Print Costs for Wide Format Ink Plotters

Over the weekend I took the time to finish one of my spreadsheets that enables us (Print4Pay Hotel members) to identify the cost per square foot for HP inkjet plotters.  

 

Let me tell you this was no easy task.  Why in the world is there no information from HP that states how many milliliters of black ink is used to print one square foot for a CAD drawing?

 

Every time I searched the HP web site for additional information about cost per page for Design jet plotters I was stymied by a notice that stated there was no information.

I was able to find a few documents that related to color use, but nothing related to CAD drawings.  Each HP plotter cartridge tells us how much ink is in the cartridge, but you'll never use all of the ink due to evaporation, ink head cleaning/purging and some residual ink left in the cartridge.  For example one cartridge has 69ml (milliliters) of ink.  Thus I was curious as to how much ink is a milliliter.   A milliliter measures to be one thousandth of a liter.  I know liters because that's because most of the soda bottles are now measured in liters, but how about a milliliter?  Is that less than a shot glass, more than a tablespoon? I found this handy document that tells us 1ml is also equal to 1cc, 2.5 ml is equal to a half of teaspoon, 5ml is a teaspoon, and 30ml equal two tablespoons or 1 fluid ounce.  

 

Ok, I get it,  so the HP cartridge that hold 69 milliliters of ink is equal to a little more than 2 ounces.  Since the cartridge resells for $69, the price per milliliter is $1.00.

As I stated the key was to  find out how many milliliters is used to print one square foot for a CAD drawing.  Once I was able to find that, I was able to put together a cost per square foot spreadsheet for most of the HP wide format plotters that are used or designed to print CAD documents.

Last week I wrote a blog titled "15 Critical Questions for Selling Wide Format in the AEC Market", these questions were outlined in a down loadable document. With that document I've now been able to include a "Square foot" calculator (just type in the width and length of the document), which enables you to find the square footage of wide format document, a cost per square foot for the HP ink , cost for the black print heads, cost for the Canon print heads, maintenance kits, cost for cut sheet wide format paper, cost for Diazo paper.  The three awesome spreadsheets that will calculate your customers cost for running their current plot device!  

As most businesses are catching up with how much the cost to print a standard letter or legal page on their current print devices, most AEC companies that own ink based plotters/MFP's still have no clue as the cost per square foot.  Thus, this is a market where we can educate the customer on their existing ink printing costs and hopefully migrate them to LED Plotters/MFP's that have a much lower cost per square foot to print or copy.