Many people can put their feet in their mouths tring to explain this and because of many variables.... don't quote me on these. They are probably not even typical.
Specifically:
How many prints can you average from 1 (one) cartridge of AnaBright Ink?
Approx 200?. Since all designs are different and no design will come off of one cart this is not really a good way to look at this. Typical designs that I do, usually have 40 to 65 cents on CMYK. Some designs may not use any of one cart, or you may do a whole bunch of shirts and go through 2 carts of one color before changing the others.
How many average prints can be made with 4 CMYK & 4 white cartridges total?
Using the same formula you may get 1600, but like I said you have to know what design we're talking about.
How much ink or what percent of a cartridge do you factor in as lost to maintenance or waste?
If you are really doing a lot of printing every day, every hour your percent will be less than if you print a couple of times a week. If you had to do a head clean 5 days a week (just to get going), you'd use $60 worth of ink. Some people use more, some less... and some times you'll have environmental issues that cause you to use more. I will say that the new firmware and Gen 2 head seems to have reduced this, but like I said, if you are a new user you want to base your usage much higher to compensate for learning, experimentation and your individual environmental factors. You may have to shave 10-20% off total numbers, based on what you can possibly print in a day... like I said, just depends.
I looked at developing a calculator for this and the deeper I dug into it the more variables popped up, the variables are very hard to average to come up with some sort of standards.
The main problems I have found with trying to answer the questions above are the following:
1. The user / owner can make a siginificant difference - on how the machine is maintained, what is the environment it is located and how the graphic is printed.
2. The size of the graphics will vary from one business & geographical location to another.
It is my opinion that the answers to your questions are at best a hypothesis (i.e. educated guess) only after knowing more about your business, your target market, the graphics you want to print, how often you are going to print, white ink vs. CMYK only and the environment the printer is going to be located in. Without this information, it is like picking lottery numbers - pure guess, because the factors above can significantly change the answers.
Hope this gives you some more things to think about. I am by no means against dtg printring, but you should know all the factors that can affect your profitability.
we have had ours for a couple months now and are beyond totally disappointed in the machines ability.
on black shirts we figured for an average size front and back with pretreatment included was costing use about $6 a shirt to do without labor, just materials, and still no where near what we would call quality print
white shirts are better, yet the color ability is not anywhere near what anajet call vibrant
we printed 150 full color front and back prints on white, on vivid medium 1 setting, and replaced cartridges very soon after, so cost per shirt is alot higher than they claim, but this is just our experience, so take it for what it is worth
yes i have been wondering about this as well, but ink usage and costs are pretty much reltive to your design. if your graphic is only 2x2 monochromatic, then it obviously wont cost as much as a 10x10 multicolored graphic.
i think a better question would be:
consider the graphic to be maxed out, i forgot what it was, i think 12x12? or whatever the limit is. multicolored. how many prints would you get out of your cartridges?
Here are the flaws with this concept in my opinion: 1. Almost no one that I am aware of prints the full platen (12.5" x 16") all the time, so this is an unrealistic number to use in my opinion. 2. There can be a huge difference between the amounts of ink you put down depending on which settings you use in the RIP you are using. 3. A graphic with a 100% white underbase uses more ink than one that is gray-scaled with a lot of dark colors in it. 4. The amount of ink wasted doing cleanings can vary greatly depending on the environment where the printer is located. Some people have to do an ink charge to get the printer ready every morning. Others don't have to do anything or maybe a simple head cleaning. 5. The number of misprints can vary from one business to another... which has to be taken into effect when you are trying to calculate the yield of prints per a cartridge. 6. Differences in the type of fabric and color you are printing on can have an effect on the amount of ink you will use. 7. A true cost per a print will also include the replacement parts to keep the printer running. Some people can keep a print head for more than a year, while others are going through them every 4 months. Other items like capping stations, wiper blades, dampers,… are consumable items that will need to be replaced as well.
For these reasons, it is extremely difficult to determine the total yield of shirts per a cartridge without making a pure guess - which is what people don't want to do. Most people will take a slightly above average size design they would typically print and figure out the ink cost associated with that. Then multiple that number by 1.15 to 1.25 to cover the costs of cleanings and misprints.
These are my opinions based on my first-hand experience working with all types of dtg printers with business spread all over the U.S. That is why I believe firmly that the numbers can vary greatly from one business to another. Just some things to consider when you are doing your business plan.
I totally agree with Mark here. I must admit I was a little "tongue and cheek" when I posted this last weekend.... This brings up the sore issue of why mfg's even provide these numbers in the first place. It's because buyers demand them. Read through the archives in this forum and you'll get a whole gamut of scenarios so that you can read and also read between the lines. I thought that I qualified my answers OK (I could have done better). My averages probably would stand up, but as Mark stated, we're iffy when we start really understanding our totals. Any business has blanket costs that will occur wether or not we're creating product. This is where maintenance ink/labor/hardware replacement need to reside. All these costs need to be covered by the profit we ask for. We do this by marking up our costs. One cannot price a shirt by thinking "hey I used 60 cents + $1 labor + $2 shirt....". Believe me... when I got my machine, I micromanaged to a fault just trying to know where some kind of break-even was. I didn't and would never recomend relying on info given by sales people or in this forum, unless you look at it in an overall context. Don't be afraid of marking up everything 3 to 5 times to come up with a retail cost. If your cost is too high, you customer will let you know, if it's too low... your accountant will.
Ink Usage & Cost 
