Standards for "Average Ink Cost" Calculations?

I've seen a lot of discussion about ink prices in the last few days, and it reminded me of the "conversations" I used to have with folks on various forums all the time, regarding the importance of fully understanding your ink costs when doing DTG printing. There are various sources of information regarding ink cost, including most RIP software (which usually include some mechanism for calculating ink cost on a "per image" basis) and even some manufacturers who track (or "log") their users' actual ink usage through a similar mechanism within the software.

Of course, tracking the cost "per print" is simple - the area where many people seem to disagree is what constitutes an "average" print? Since every unique market will have different interests, fashion and design sense, etc, it is difficult to say exactly what an "average" print would be for most people - some people seem to print a lot of smaller images in their particular market, whereas other shops feel as though prints that fill the entire platen area are typically the norm.

For my own purposes, I have always considered an average print to be a 12" x 12" print with medium to heavy coverage; for many shops, this represents a fair amount of the overall business. Therefore, when I am trying to determine how much I am going to spend on most of the average images I print, I typically default to the overall average across this image size. In our shop, we price our printing based on a standard print size (which includes anything larger than a left chest print, but no greater than 144 square inches); I want to ensure that we are profitable on any "standard size" print that comes through the door. Since we price "small" prints differently (usually smaller than 16 square inches), we subsequently monitor the "average" cost of these prints separately. Additionally, we charge more for images that exceed our standard print size, so it is also important to perform a separate evaluation for "over sized" prints.

We print a lot of work for companies who want to take full advantage of the outstanding full color printing capabilities that we offer, and if you have seen our Facebook page or many of the pics I have posted here on the forum over the past year or so, you will see that an "average" print for us will usually use a decent amount of ink - when you give your customers the ability to print big, inevitably they will want to take advantage of that, and it is critical to understand how much it can cost to print the full size. My advice if you are evaluating a potential machine purchase or just want to have a better understanding of your ink costs is to take a number of your own "control sample" images and have them printed to the level of quality you find acceptable; use a few images with different amounts of coverage and print sizes, and try get get a feel for how little, or how much ink you can potentially use to achieve the results you are looking for.

Trying to pin down an "average ink cost" is a vague pursuit, with countless variables to consider - work from a micro level and evaluate the ink cost for specific images that you provide, and make sure you match that up with the expected output quality (it is easy to manipulate RIP or software settings to make the ink costs look higher or lower, and it could have a profound impact on print quality).