OK- I'm not interested in discussing waste ink- that's been covered before. What concerns me is that actual sq ft print cost (i.e., If I print a 1' by 1' photo, how many $'s worth of ink is actually on the substrate?).
This issue has come up due to the new ink metering capability in Onyx 6.5.
When we purchased the machine, Seiko told us that prints with photographic or light backgrounds should use .5-1.2 ml/sq.ft ink or $.15-$.36/sq.ft (Assuming original ink MSRP of $300/liter). But, if the Onyx meter is correct, we are actually using about 4.16 ml/sq.ft. or $1.24/sq.ft!!! Now, that is using a custom profile- but the canned profiles I tried were actually WORSE!
I called Onyx and they claim that the meter is "fairly" accurate. I called Seiko and they say they stand by the numbers their engineers calculated. I also heard that its possible that the Onyx meter becomes more accurate over time- though I don't understand how that's possible.
About built-in counters... The built-in counter in Caldera is, from what i can judge, deadly precise. But still... it is based on the actual number of drops, where the drops are actually the same all the time, and they are 12 picoliters. I calculated recently my average cost and it seems that printing+waste is right now about $2.5 to $2.8 per square meter. And i mean METER :) Not square foot. But...
...here's the trick - i have a piece of good insider information which clearly states that profiles for Seiko from Caldera, for the same file, are actually 20 to 40% cheaper than in case of Onyx or PhotoPrint. Now, i would normally consider it big pile of BS, but... no one using other RIPs can claim even $3 per square meter, even without waste.
The other thing is - how much do you pay for a liter of your ink, huh? :)
In my opinion, if that Onyx meter is correct, then the profiles you're using are just wrong, overly saturated, with too high ink limits.
Well, I'm not at liberty to say exactly how much I am paying for ink. Suffice it to say that I don't pay $300/liter.
I understand some variance of ink usage with different profiles, but nearly quadruple? My mutoh toucans have ink usage right where it is supposed to be and I profiled those using the same techniques as the Seiko. Not to mention that, as I said, the Onyx O.E. profiles were even worse than mine.
I'm really tending to think that the Onyx meter is wrong.
Well, then indeed this meter might be wrong. Can you edit the drop size there? In Caldera i can - check if it is 12 picoliters. I believe you should get on average approximately 100 square meters from a liter. So far i got approx 6500 square meters from 57 liters of ink since i started using Seiko two months ago. It gives me something like 114 sqm/liter. And i believe that is a much better result than what the specifications said. Of course that depends on what you print, but i do mostly vinyl for displays and vehicle wraps.
And the profiles... well... Seiko inks are pretty amazing and i must say that it seems that less ink is used for the same amount of printed material than on the Toucans we have. But... Seikos are profiled and are running Caldera, while Toucans are not profiled (only linearization) and they are running the most basic Onyx. On the other hand, of course, the ink for Toucans that we use is 8 times cheaper than the one we use for Seiko ;)
