Have any of you guys kept track of ink usage to be sure what the machine tells you is accurate or not?
Thinking more about this ... it would be pretty hard to compare since you would never run out of all the colors at the same time. However if someone had kept track over a years time , might give a person a good idea.
Thanks
Have any of you guys kept track of ink usage to be sure what the machine tells you is accurate or not?
Todd,
Weighing your Carts on a electronic gram scale is a good way to do this. Just weigh all carts together before and after a job. This will also alow you to document how much ink is used during maintenance.
Why bother? you wanna complain about machine lying about 5 cents here or there?
I look at it this way, how much money did I make end of month and how many cart. I bought....
click, click, click.. I made a nice margin : ) even though I do 99% contract work
Large corporations don't really follow your "why bother" mentality... I bet companies like McDonald's know, down to the penny, what a Big Mac costs. Obviously, we know that you and I have completely different views on what is important to a business owner, but there are many who do care about these things.
Sigh true, people try to save a penny but loose a dollar in process.
Mcdonald need to know there overall cost to penny because thats all they are making Lol.
I mean a $1 burger must cost them 50/60 cents atleast
Have any of you guys kept track of ink usage to be sure what the machine tells you is accurate or not?
I haven't done any sort of long term analysis of accuracy, but when we first got our machine, we were printing some large orders that were going to take us well into the night. By late afternoon, it looked like there was no way we would make it through the entire order that we had remaining. I called Raul, who told me to output the most recent print log, which he somehow converted into an XLS spreadsheet, and sent back to me (I wish there were a tool to convert the output log, ourselves; there is a LOT of valuable information in there!). I was incredibly impressed with how detailed it was, going so far as to indicate when you did each and every cleaning cycle, as well as how much of each color was used for the scheduled maintenance, etc. Raul did some calculations based on the image I was printing, and told me I would be fine. Reluctantly, I kept printing, and sure enough.... I made it all the way through, with ink to spare.
I have never really had cause to doubt if the machine reports the amount of ink usage, accurately or not, since then. I don't think I've exported any more logs, since then, mostly because I don't want to bug Raul every time I want to check my recent print statistics. However, it feels good knowing that its there, and seems pretty accurate. Maybe when my machine is back up and running, I will try weighing out some carts before a big order!
Ink usage and cost 
