...Furthermore, for those people to whom the cost of printing may well matter, it would be much more important to know how much ink, on average, each of these printers uses to print a sq. ft. of your favorite paper. That difference could be minimal or quite important, but we just can't say yet. So much to say, for those who need to know these costs, one needs to see the whole picture projected with reliable assumptions over the service life of the printers to know which is likely to be the more economical choice.
The estimates provided by the printer companies and by third party reviews like those at Red River Paper are based on continuous throughput studies (i.e., print a couple hundred prints in a row, and measure how much ink has been used by simple weighing procedures). These studies provide "best case" results and do not capture the wasted ink volumes that will never hit the paper in lower frequency usage conditions and which greatly affect the amortized cost per print in more typical home or small studio printing sessions. The continuous throughput types of studies all tend to yield quite similar results, with projections of about 1.5- 2 ml per sq. ft. depending on image content. Hence, I don't think the specific printer model, screening patterns, print head, and ink formulation technologies are all that serious of variables in how much ink hits the paper when making a high quality inkjet print. The real wildcard variables in total cost of ownership and cost per print are actually both frequency and volume (i.e quantify of prints) of use. These two variables are highly dependent on the enduser's personal print making routines. If you print almost daily even if only one or two small prints, you will come reasonably close to those continuous throughput estimates of ink consumption. If you print only weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, and only in low quantities of prints per session, then the ink consumption starts to skyrocket alarmingly due to increased printer maintenance cycles, often not initiated by the user but automatically in some way by the printer.
My Canon Pro-1, for example, uses simple clock timer rules to start a cleaning sequence behind the scenes prior to feeding the first print of the day if the time since last use is over 2.5 days. It will use several ml of ink to get itself ready to print, and the user will experience a few minutes of whirring sounds before the first print actually begins to feed, the long wait to feed the first print a sure indication that maintenance is being done. A single print per day on the Pro-1 will ward off this preemptive printer cleaning cycle. I've had mixed results on whether a simple nozzle check will suffice in lieu of an actual print. More study is necessary. Nevertheless, with almost daily use you will come very close to the 1.5-2ml/sq. ft ink consumption value, but an 8x10 inch borderless print every 3 days will now consume about 8 or more ml total (approximately 1.2 ml for the ink hitting the paper, and about 7ml going into the waste tank). Managing this excessive consumption therefore requires a combination of both frequency and print quantity strategies implemented by the end user. For example, if you can't print daily but you can make several or more prints in one printing session once a week, you will be amortizing the wasted ink over those several prints, not just the first print, and that will help to get the costs per print down significantly. For the Canon Pro-1 at least, those clock timer rules lead to more aggressive cleanings preemptively undertaken by the printer, culminating in the mother of all cleaning cycles at 45 days of non use (that fact documented in the service manual).
It was this low frequency usage scenario that really bit me hard on my first set of cartridges in the Pro-1 and got me interested in running more cost amortization studies as Mark S has alluded to in this thread. These studies take much more time (real time with real usage scenarios) than most reviewers can accomplish since the printers in review are typically loaners. I buy my printers and can therefore perform those extended studies, but it's a labor of love with every print, cartridge, and other material costs being documented in a spreadsheet, so I haven't been able to published very much on the subject yet.
cheers,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
