...The only way to tell would be by weighing the cartridges before and immediately after initializing. Otherwise there would be no reliable way of estimating print costs based on the first set of cartridges.
Brian A
I understand. However, I don't get too hung up trying to figure out what is the "true" cost of a single perfect print on a particular paper. It's a bit of an academic exercise, IMHO. If you really want to track total ownership costs and amortize over all the good prints, you need to keep pretty copious notes, including how many rejected prints you have made to date due to both human error and printer error issues. I had two reject prints in the first six prints I made on my first day with the P600. The first print was bad because the Epson install package automatically installed an "AirPrint" driver on my Mac instead of the conventional Wi-fi driver, and I didn't notice it until I sent the first application managed color print to the printer over wi-fi. The AirPrint driver had no clue what to do with "Photoshop manages colors" even though it happily transferred RGB mystery meat values to the printer. So, the print was a color management disaster. I had to uninstall and manually reinstall the correct Epson driver. The second reject print occurred trying to set up the thicker third party HN Photo Rag Pearl. Hahnemuhle recommended Premium Luster paper as the correct setting even though the paper has to go through the feed path for fine art papers. The driver thus defaulted to .3mm thickness setting and standard platten gap. The P600 has no "auto" setting for platten gap, either, unlike my Epson 3880 which at least gives you a fighting chance when loading in untried new media. Given that the fine art paper feed tray is specified for 0.7mm minimum thickness paper and Epson defaults to 0.5mm for its OEM fine art papers, one might hope the .3mm setting for Premium luster paper would have been overridden by a default to .5mm at the very least since it was being fed through the thick paper tray and the P600 does detect where the paper is or isn't. Anyway, I should have first found the hidden menu for thickness and platten setting (not discussed at all in the owner's basic guide shipped with the printer, BTW) and thus double checked. My bad. Even so, the platten gap also needed to be set to "wide" which is the only other choice on the P600. So, I got my first head strike. Ouch
Anyway, one could say that there was some operator error involved in both print failures I described, but this is all too common in the "joy" of home printing, and when people don't track total cost of ownership and actual productivity yields in an ongoing basis, I tend to take all the reported per print costs with a grain of salt.
Suffice to say, convenience, pride in one's craftsmanship, total control over final print quality and print permanence, are my reasons to do my own printing. Home printing has never competed well in terms of cost per print when compared to bargain basement digital printing services like you find at most of the Big Box retailers.
best,
Mark
http://www.aardenburg-imaging.com
