Luminous Landscape Forum
Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Printing: Printers, Papers and Inks => Topic started by: chilehead on November 02, 2006, 03:05:08 pm
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For those who own the B9180, how do you rate the ink usage? Preliminary reviews seemed to indicate average ink use for this class of printer. User reports in online forums however seem to indicate higher than average ink usage, especially with light grey.
I am wondering if this is true, or if perceptions might be skewed because of folks who are new to fine art papers. With my old i9900, the fine art papers seemed to drink up more ink, but I don't know if this is true of pigment printers.
Any thoughts?
-Mark
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I haven't been paying attention. The initial setup takes a ton. It seems to be okay after that but I'm not going to really think about it until I hit my next set of cartridges.
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For those who own the B9180, how do you rate the ink usage? Preliminary reviews seemed to indicate average ink use for this class of printer. User reports in online forums however seem to indicate higher than average ink usage, especially with light grey.
I am wondering if this is true, or if perceptions might be skewed because of folks who are new to fine art papers. With my old i9900, the fine art papers seemed to drink up more ink, but I don't know if this is true of pigment printers.
Any thoughts?
-Mark
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Any users thinking the usage is high must be including the initial purge. After the first ininitialisation the consumption falls right into place with moderate ink use per size compared to all other A3+ ( size printers.
Yes there is a lot of grey componenet replacement with the light grey. By doing so there is less triples of color making the grey areas neutral. Thus the lG is going to cost less than if it were composite grey printing.
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Just saw a review on www.photo-i.co.uk. The standby mode is recommended since it cleans the heads every 6 hours. HP stated that this process uses only a small amount of ink since only the clogged heads will be cleaned. But, how small is small?
According to http://www.neilsnape.com/HP9180_review.htm: (http://www.neilsnape.com/HP9180_review.htm:) "...Not to worry, according to HP it can run a year and a half per set of cartridges if anyone were to leave it on and not use it!...". This may not sound a lot, but considering the price of the inks (Netherlands 8x40 euro) this comes down to ink costs of almost 18 euro/month without doing any printing! So lets calculate how expensive one print A3/month would get: (8 ink tanks x40 euro)/70+18 euro=22.50 euro. So the main costs are cleaning!
The ink price might be half in USA, but even then its very expensive at 11.25$ / 1 print/month! So, no matter how much you will print, the added cost for head cleaning will at least be 18 euro/month!
Please comment if my calculations are wrong.
Bert
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HP has ink usage info at: http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/us/en/...9180/photo.html (http://h10060.www1.hp.com/pageyield/us/en/PSPB9180/photo.html)
Using the info on that page I calculated an ink cost of:
$1.8168 est total cost of ink for 11x17
$1.3990 est total cost of ink per sq ft
$15.0602 est total cost of ink per sq m
Do a search on site:hp.com page yield if the URL is screwed up.
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Seems like my 9180 has been using more ink overall than my 2400. That is based on how many times I have to order ink carts and not with any scientific testing (plus those are larger than the Epson ink carts). On the other hand I've been using my HP 130 for over a year and have yet to replace all of the carts!
While all of this ink talk comparing pennies per square inch seems to be one way to compare printers, the ink costs for all of them are so cheap when you compare all of this to getting prints made at a fine pro lab in the good old days. Do you remember how much a Fuji Crystal Archive print cost from a place like LaserLight - $30 each for reprints for an 11x14. And all of these printers we discuss here produce prints that look better and last longer. I'm making better prints now and haul a lot more cash to the bank no matter which printer I use, or how much ink I have to provide.