cost per square inch/foot for z3100 / ipf8000

[agwe23]

i was wondering if anyone had any data on the cost per square inch/foot for large format printers.  

i am currently in the market for a 44 inch printer in a print for pay environment.  i am based in the philippines and the prices charged here for those services are nowhere near the prices charged in the US; so cost per square in/ft is very important, especially since qualitywise, these 2 printers are pretty much toe to toe with each other.

i was able to get cost per square foot for the ipf8000 and it's pretty low (compared to epson) in the printworks website.  but i could not find any cost estimates as regards to the hp products (either z2100 or the z3100)

[Stephen Best]

I don't have the figures you're after, but in my experience inkjet printing on resin-coated isn't competitive with chromogenic (Lambda etc). Cheap enough to do for yourself, but the margins aren't there for commercial work. Printing on rag or canvas is a different story, and the ink cost for this is likely pretty irrelevant. But by all means do your own sums, and for your own local market.

[ternst]

agwe23 (whatever your name is):

I just looked up the usage figures for my 24" z3100 for the past month and came up with about 2ml total ink use per square foot using glossy/luster papers. If you bought individual ink carts direct from HP (at full retail price) that would be about a dollar per square foot for the ink. You can get the carts cheaper elsewhere, plus can buy twin packs, so that price would be a fair amount lower if you did a lot of printing...

Tim Ernst in Arkansas
http://www.Cloudland.net

[ricgal]

The 3100 gives you detailed accounting for every job so at least it is easy to work out exactly each much job costs-  much cheaper than an Epson 4000 i hasten to add which you can almost hear greedily sucking away at those 220mil carts (and dumping most of it i n the waste ink tank)

[Chris_Brown]

i was wondering if anyone had any data on the cost per square inch/foot for large format printers. 
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There's one report [a href=\"http://www.printworks-usa.com/PDFs/iPF8K9K-CostAnalysis.pdf]for the Canon iPF8000 here.[/url]
There's a more complete report for a Canon iPF5000 here.