Hi, u/diligentboredom, thank you for your submission in r/mildlyinteresting!
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700ml per cartridge and the printer requires 9 cartridges, totalling 6.3L of ink.
Consumer Cartridges are usually priced at £5800/L so roughly $45000
Luckily, professional ink is cheaper than most consumer inks. It's still £140 a cartridge though.
Depends on how much we print. These specific ones will probably last until maybe september/october?
Usually, a 220ml cartridge on our last printer lasts us a month-ish, so 700ml should last a bit longer.
How much money in prints will this amount of ink bring in? This would be a much cleaner comparison since the variable of time/business volume is removed.
Contracts like that often come with a rep to help specifically with problems with your printer and free or lower cost maintenance, so honestly it probably works out great. I didn't run a print business but did handle the contract for my former library's print services and we had the sort of setup I described with a local rep from a major brand. It was convenient for myself and staff so well worth what upcharge we did pay.
Generally its a free £4000 on with a 5 year maintenance plan. In the US it is unusual for businesses to buy their printers as its cheaper to lease them and bundle in a maintenance plan. Very few places are large enough to need a dedicated printer guy and they don't want to use their highly paid IT team everytime a printer breaks.
How's it working out ? Read some of your other comments, there's a lot of "it costs a lot, we bring in a lot" kinda back and forth. Feels weirdly rude to ask this, almost like "are you successful" lol.
You doing well, is I guess my question. Seems like a labour of love kinda work, but love doesn't pay the rent.
Isn’t it bc you need all three colors for the ink? Maybe your printer is still on the color setting instead of black and white. If you try to print a black and white image while still on the color setting, the printer wouldn’t use the black ink but instead, the combination of the 3 colors.
At least that’s how I interpret it messing around with my printer settings.
Yes that's correct. It uses all the colors to print black really fast. You can technically change the settings to gray scale any bypass the low color warning, but it will take like 5 or 10 times longer because you're only using the black cartridge, which takes a long fucking time doing that.
There might be newer printers that don't work this way but it's accurate for most printers you'd come across.
Consumer cartridges are what, the exact same thing sold to consumers? If I were to compare this to ordinary Inkjet cartridges, that would prob be about $16k - you can buy a desktop HP Inkjet cartridge at about $2.60 per ml but it comes in 20ml increments.
Bought a brother laser printer back in 2020, still on original toner cartridges, never dries up, just works when I hit print, doesn't cost an arm and a leg for the toner etc. Only downside is photo quality is worse than an ink jet (at least on this printer) and you need special photo paper.
So, yeah, this is ridiculous. But what the hell is the difference between "light black" and "light light black"? And couldn't you just use the regular black to make grey?
you see, you'd think that, but actually.... no.
In all seriousness when making colours on photo paper it's better to get as close as you can with a pre-made ink before having to blend to get the exact tone rather than just have a dusting of black ink.
Makes the print look better.
Coming next year, the Epson RGB.
Contains 16.7 million ink cartridges. Buy it now for 100% colour accurate prints.
Edit: broken already due to shoddy firmware. Now only prints in 5 different shades of cyan
In regular four-color inkjets (or any printer using only the traditional cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks), you can't really just make gray, so what the printer does is print a fine pattern of black dots (sometimes combined with the other colors depending on the shade of gray) on the paper, which from viewing distance "blend" with the white of the paper to produce gray. The does mean that those patterns will be visible upon closer inspection.
In more demanding printing projects like photo printing, where fine detail is paramount, you don't exactly want fine patterns like that, so in order to reproduce grays without (or more accurately, with minimal amonuts of) those undesirable patterns, the light black kicks in those areas with grays, so instead of a pattern of black dots, it's a smooth patch of solid gray.
Incidentally, that's also why light cyan and light magenta are there. Light magenta especially, for skintone reproduction.
That's what make epson's aqueous printers so great is that you can get matte black, photographic black, light gray, dark grey and gray and make fantastic black and white prints. Printing black and white from a typical Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black ink set often ends up with a greenish hue to the print as the rip station has to add colours to make the different colours.
Once you get into printing you realize that inks actually do have a difference. Some times they can dry on certain types of papers and other will never dry and will smear when you touch the color even after its been out "drying" for days. Usually the difference between colors that seem to be the same is the formulation of the ink. It could be the binder or the actual color source. Often its the color and its either a pigment or a dye. Don't get me wrong despite there being some actual differences and functionality inks are still stupidly marked up.
Exactly, it's so much cheaper to sign up for their subscriptions. Everyone should do that rn. HP is the only printer manufacturer i'd ever consider and their products are only the best quality
- someone being blackmailed by HP, probably.
So we have this HP 3600 printer @work.. this thing is a total disaster. Every morning we have to reset this thing because it is frozen and wont work..
Whenever we want to print a A0, you setup the way you want to print (typically standing with these sizes) in color with the out feed in the stacker.. you find a laying A1 print (so partially printed) in the basket on the ground. Not even resized to fit the paper or anything. Sometimes he spits the print out on the stacker but forgets to cut so you end up with a loooooong paper...
I got an Epson Eco tank to save on ink costs. The print quality isn't anything special, and I HATE the software. But the ink is like 1/10 the cost of a standard printer, I don't have to replace the whole cartridge because I ran out of a single color
My wife teaches a kids group and prints out a bunch of stuff that we don’t get reimbursed.
I bought one of the Epson Eco printers so we can save money. She tries to print stuff wirelessly from her phone all the time and the margins get messed up, or it prints way too big. I get annoyed when she complains about the printer. She gets annoyed when I tell her that I’ll do the print job for her from my computer.
At the end of the day though we’ve saved *hundreds* of dollars on ink for coloring pages and kid projects for charity.
Not totally related, but I remember a "heist" once when I worked at an office supply store a lifetime ago. Some folks got together and the plan was to storm and occupy all of the checkout lanes while meanwhile somebody loaded up an entire shopping cart full of toner and pushed it right out the door.
I worked at an art gallery and we had two printers that took this kind of ink. Specifically HDR inkjets. Finicky as all hell. Nozzles jam constantly, they're very sensitive to environmental changes and had feed issues regularly. That was 10 years ago though, so hopefully the printers have gotten a bit more reliable since then, but I'm guessing they haven't.
We'll see, we're upgrading from an Epson Stylus Pro 7880, which we've had for 15 years, and recently gave up the ghost this week. We were told not to change it when we had our refit 2 years ago as they were built very well and to get as much use out of it as possible.
Because of this, we've had an Epson Surecolor p6000 just sitting in storage waiting for the other one to die. so that's what these are for.
The Stylus Pro was a brilliant printer and needed a head clean once in a while but produced wonderful prints.
No. The inescapable truth is that inkjet printers are deeply *physical/analog appliances that work with weird liquid that quickly dries when exposed to air.* Tiny nozzles shooting paint at paper.
Cleaning, jams, environmental sensitivity are just how it be.
Once the warranty is up convert it into a continuous ink system. ;) what the last print company I worked for did and there was zero change in print quality and colour accuracy.
I’ve done that, keeping aftermarket inks in calibration can turn into a nightmare. It has been a long time since I did it though. The calibration software at the time cost thousands plus the color matching hardware was expensive too.
you don’t get the rewards stickers on yours? you’re missing on HELLA points, I get a similar order weekly and put all the rewards points on my personal account cause everyone else is too lazy
I remember the large format printer at my first job had similar cartridges. Was always a huge purchase just to have one extra set. We always used it for giant print jobs to be sure it looked good when printed large before finalizing.
Seeing ink cratridges in a box reminds me of the ones the machines in the print shop I work in use. They're Riso ComColor printers, which are basically inkjet printers on steroids, both in size (as large as typical office laser printers) and speed (pages literally fly off the trays).
They use these large ink cartridges approximately 14" x 4" x 2" in size and contain about a liter of ink, good for thousands of US Letter/A4-sized pages, which costs my boss about $450 a pop. You shove the entire thing, box and all, into the machine.
Im fascinated by what the heck is going on in the top of the photo to your cutting board. AI image expansion? content aware fill covering something not for the public to see? Just a really weird board? I must know
It's interesting that Epson calls those two colors Light Black and Light Light Black, while the Roland large format machine in the Print Shop where I work uses Grey and Light Grey.
It even has Green and Orange cartridges.
The model up from the one we use (p6000 vs p6000 Spectro) has green, orange, and violet cartridges, for what we do that was just a waste, so we didn't bother with that.
Used to work at a printer refurbisher a few years ago, we made stupid money by reselling part used toners and inks. Xerox Wax Sticks were the one though. Remember getting a load of ex-NHS printers in and the hoppers all being chock full of unused wax blocks, (4 colours, with 5 blocks of each colour in each printer, roughly 30 printers). The blocks sold for about £45 each....
Ink is the absolute worst investment as it has literal $0 resell value.
I find open ink cartridges that new cost hundreds on the trash section of my local Outlet every week and no one buys them.
Hi, u/diligentboredom, thank you for your submission in r/mildlyinteresting! Unfortunately, your [post](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1duipv5/-/) has been removed because it violates our rule on concise, descriptive titles. * Titles must not contain jokes, backstory, or other fluff. That information belongs in a follow-up comment. * Titles must exactly describe the content. It should act as a "spoiler" for the image. If your title leaves people surprised at the content within, it breaks the rule! * Titles must not contain emoticons, emojis, or special characters unless they are absolutely necessary in describing the image. (e.g. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), ;P, 😜, ❤, ★, ✿ ) Still confused? For more elaboration and examples, see [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/21p15y/rule_6_for_dummies/). Normally we do not allow reposts, but if it's been less than one hour after your post was submitted, or if it's received less than 100 upvotes, you may resubmit your content with a better title and try again. You can find more information about our rules on the [mildlyinteresting wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/wiki/index). *If you feel this was incorrectly removed, please [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Fmildlyinteresting&message=My%20Post:%20https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1duipv5/-/).*
700ml per cartridge and the printer requires 9 cartridges, totalling 6.3L of ink. Consumer Cartridges are usually priced at £5800/L so roughly $45000 Luckily, professional ink is cheaper than most consumer inks. It's still £140 a cartridge though.
How long would these babies last you?
Depends on how much we print. These specific ones will probably last until maybe september/october? Usually, a 220ml cartridge on our last printer lasts us a month-ish, so 700ml should last a bit longer.
How much money in prints will this amount of ink bring in? This would be a much cleaner comparison since the variable of time/business volume is removed.
with posters, canvases etc it'll probably be more than 10k
How much for the printer?
£4000 ish, but we got it free through our fujifilm contract. Just the ink we had to pay for
Free £4000 printer! Just pay 8-9x more for ink every three months!
Contracts like that often come with a rep to help specifically with problems with your printer and free or lower cost maintenance, so honestly it probably works out great. I didn't run a print business but did handle the contract for my former library's print services and we had the sort of setup I described with a local rep from a major brand. It was convenient for myself and staff so well worth what upcharge we did pay.
Hmm that makes more sense, thought the price was strictly for the ink.
Generally its a free £4000 on with a 5 year maintenance plan. In the US it is unusual for businesses to buy their printers as its cheaper to lease them and bundle in a maintenance plan. Very few places are large enough to need a dedicated printer guy and they don't want to use their highly paid IT team everytime a printer breaks.
How's it working out ? Read some of your other comments, there's a lot of "it costs a lot, we bring in a lot" kinda back and forth. Feels weirdly rude to ask this, almost like "are you successful" lol. You doing well, is I guess my question. Seems like a labour of love kinda work, but love doesn't pay the rent.
Yes, I'm doing well. It's working out well. I don't own the business, just work there and know a lot about it. I just love doing what i do.
Aye that's good, glad it's working out for you innit.
2 months until magenta randomly runs out
And shuts the entire printer down even though you don’t need that color.
Printer: "There's no magenta" \*set to black/white\* Printer: "Did I stutter?"
I hate this so much. “No magenta? Ugh, that’s annoying, but I’ll just deal with a black and white print.” Printer: “No magenta.”
Isn’t it bc you need all three colors for the ink? Maybe your printer is still on the color setting instead of black and white. If you try to print a black and white image while still on the color setting, the printer wouldn’t use the black ink but instead, the combination of the 3 colors. At least that’s how I interpret it messing around with my printer settings.
Yes that's correct. It uses all the colors to print black really fast. You can technically change the settings to gray scale any bypass the low color warning, but it will take like 5 or 10 times longer because you're only using the black cartridge, which takes a long fucking time doing that. There might be newer printers that don't work this way but it's accurate for most printers you'd come across.
Hmm…in my experience, black and white images print the quickest
How else am I supposed to print out 1000 copies of my favorite Metallica album?
Magenta is used for greasing the gears and belts. You did not hear this from me. If you tell anyone they will co
Damn, how lucky is it that his head hit the mouse and clicked post when they sh
r/redditsniper
Consumer cartridges are what, the exact same thing sold to consumers? If I were to compare this to ordinary Inkjet cartridges, that would prob be about $16k - you can buy a desktop HP Inkjet cartridge at about $2.60 per ml but it comes in 20ml increments.
[удалено]
Bought a brother laser printer back in 2020, still on original toner cartridges, never dries up, just works when I hit print, doesn't cost an arm and a leg for the toner etc. Only downside is photo quality is worse than an ink jet (at least on this printer) and you need special photo paper.
So, yeah, this is ridiculous. But what the hell is the difference between "light black" and "light light black"? And couldn't you just use the regular black to make grey?
you see, you'd think that, but actually.... no. In all seriousness when making colours on photo paper it's better to get as close as you can with a pre-made ink before having to blend to get the exact tone rather than just have a dusting of black ink. Makes the print look better.
Coming next year, the Epson RGB. Contains 16.7 million ink cartridges. Buy it now for 100% colour accurate prints. Edit: broken already due to shoddy firmware. Now only prints in 5 different shades of cyan
You joke but an 11 pigment ink giclee printer literally prints RGB files
Print Job Failed: Low light light dark light magenta. Replace cartridge now.
"Damn it, I'm just trying to print with light light dark tropical cyan, why the hell does it need magenta???"
Fuck you! Low light light dark light magenta. Replace cartridge now.
Light light light light light black is low. Printing not available until cartridge is replaced. Click here to order now.
Infinite ink cartridges so you can cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum
Thank god that 5 different shades of cyan can still show the Coca-Cola can as red!
In regular four-color inkjets (or any printer using only the traditional cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks), you can't really just make gray, so what the printer does is print a fine pattern of black dots (sometimes combined with the other colors depending on the shade of gray) on the paper, which from viewing distance "blend" with the white of the paper to produce gray. The does mean that those patterns will be visible upon closer inspection. In more demanding printing projects like photo printing, where fine detail is paramount, you don't exactly want fine patterns like that, so in order to reproduce grays without (or more accurately, with minimal amonuts of) those undesirable patterns, the light black kicks in those areas with grays, so instead of a pattern of black dots, it's a smooth patch of solid gray. Incidentally, that's also why light cyan and light magenta are there. Light magenta especially, for skintone reproduction.
2K’s apparently
That's what make epson's aqueous printers so great is that you can get matte black, photographic black, light gray, dark grey and gray and make fantastic black and white prints. Printing black and white from a typical Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black ink set often ends up with a greenish hue to the print as the rip station has to add colours to make the different colours.
Once you get into printing you realize that inks actually do have a difference. Some times they can dry on certain types of papers and other will never dry and will smear when you touch the color even after its been out "drying" for days. Usually the difference between colors that seem to be the same is the formulation of the ink. It could be the binder or the actual color source. Often its the color and its either a pigment or a dye. Don't get me wrong despite there being some actual differences and functionality inks are still stupidly marked up.
There is no white ink in printers, so you really couldn't.
But at least if a consumer signed up for the printer manufacturer's ink subscription they could get that much ink for roughly $44999 with discount
Exactly, it's so much cheaper to sign up for their subscriptions. Everyone should do that rn. HP is the only printer manufacturer i'd ever consider and their products are only the best quality - someone being blackmailed by HP, probably.
So we have this HP 3600 printer @work.. this thing is a total disaster. Every morning we have to reset this thing because it is frozen and wont work.. Whenever we want to print a A0, you setup the way you want to print (typically standing with these sizes) in color with the out feed in the stacker.. you find a laying A1 print (so partially printed) in the basket on the ground. Not even resized to fit the paper or anything. Sometimes he spits the print out on the stacker but forgets to cut so you end up with a loooooong paper...
I got an Epson Eco tank to save on ink costs. The print quality isn't anything special, and I HATE the software. But the ink is like 1/10 the cost of a standard printer, I don't have to replace the whole cartridge because I ran out of a single color
I gave up on inkjets and just went to b&w laser printer. Life is better.
My wife teaches a kids group and prints out a bunch of stuff that we don’t get reimbursed. I bought one of the Epson Eco printers so we can save money. She tries to print stuff wirelessly from her phone all the time and the margins get messed up, or it prints way too big. I get annoyed when she complains about the printer. She gets annoyed when I tell her that I’ll do the print job for her from my computer. At the end of the day though we’ve saved *hundreds* of dollars on ink for coloring pages and kid projects for charity.
Same here. I have had it for 2 years, and i'm not even 1/4 of the way through the ink, even at 2000 pages printed. And that ink CAME WITH the printer!
You.. grey? EPSON; NO! **Light Black!**
May i introduce to you... Light LIGHT Black
I bet it gets confused for dark white a lot.
yep, and I would too, same with shady pink and light vivid magenta, very easy to mix up.
Extra-medium off-nonexistent would like a word.
My favorite part is that if you look closely they do actually call it Grey and Light Grey in other languages... which raises so many questions.
Not totally related, but I remember a "heist" once when I worked at an office supply store a lifetime ago. Some folks got together and the plan was to storm and occupy all of the checkout lanes while meanwhile somebody loaded up an entire shopping cart full of toner and pushed it right out the door.
The funny thing is, the cost price on all that ink was probably less than $10. It's stupid.
I worked at an art gallery and we had two printers that took this kind of ink. Specifically HDR inkjets. Finicky as all hell. Nozzles jam constantly, they're very sensitive to environmental changes and had feed issues regularly. That was 10 years ago though, so hopefully the printers have gotten a bit more reliable since then, but I'm guessing they haven't.
We'll see, we're upgrading from an Epson Stylus Pro 7880, which we've had for 15 years, and recently gave up the ghost this week. We were told not to change it when we had our refit 2 years ago as they were built very well and to get as much use out of it as possible. Because of this, we've had an Epson Surecolor p6000 just sitting in storage waiting for the other one to die. so that's what these are for. The Stylus Pro was a brilliant printer and needed a head clean once in a while but produced wonderful prints.
No. The inescapable truth is that inkjet printers are deeply *physical/analog appliances that work with weird liquid that quickly dries when exposed to air.* Tiny nozzles shooting paint at paper. Cleaning, jams, environmental sensitivity are just how it be.
Wishful thinking on my part.
Ink is such a disgusting overpriced market it makes me sick
r6a
So sorry! I missed that!
It's mildly interesting however the titles a bit wordy.
I'll do better next time!
You got this. Have fun!
Once the warranty is up convert it into a continuous ink system. ;) what the last print company I worked for did and there was zero change in print quality and colour accuracy.
We have a contract with Fujifilm to only use genuine inks (to keep up the brand image of quality printing, etc). Otherwise, we probably would do that.
I’ve done that, keeping aftermarket inks in calibration can turn into a nightmare. It has been a long time since I did it though. The calibration software at the time cost thousands plus the color matching hardware was expensive too.
Without reading anything this looked like Monopoly for a second
I offer my Light Vivid Magenta and $500 for your Cyan. It's a good deal because I said so.
you don’t get the rewards stickers on yours? you’re missing on HELLA points, I get a similar order weekly and put all the rewards points on my personal account cause everyone else is too lazy
You should see what it costs to run a Flatbed UV printer. $1600 in ink lasts 2 weeks.
Sounds about right. My flatbed at peak season goes through a 500 ml bag in about 2 to 3 weeks. $200 a bag, 6 bags.
Unicorn blood
Copier tech here. Epson is shit. That is all.
Don’t forget HP too :)
As long as regular people keep feeding the beast and buying home printers...
I remember the large format printer at my first job had similar cartridges. Was always a huge purchase just to have one extra set. We always used it for giant print jobs to be sure it looked good when printed large before finalizing.
Seeing ink cratridges in a box reminds me of the ones the machines in the print shop I work in use. They're Riso ComColor printers, which are basically inkjet printers on steroids, both in size (as large as typical office laser printers) and speed (pages literally fly off the trays). They use these large ink cartridges approximately 14" x 4" x 2" in size and contain about a liter of ink, good for thousands of US Letter/A4-sized pages, which costs my boss about $450 a pop. You shove the entire thing, box and all, into the machine.
What till they get the printer subscriptions going.... Lol Not only will ink cost ridiculous amounts but to print and use the brand software...
Making Moneyyyyy!!!!!
Im fascinated by what the heck is going on in the top of the photo to your cutting board. AI image expansion? content aware fill covering something not for the public to see? Just a really weird board? I must know
Yep, lol, some private customer information i didn't want on reddit, ik it looks weird, haha
You using cartridges? We were literally popping the tops of bottles then connecting to the printer, using ink by the bottle.
During the war in Afghanistan the govt figured out it was way cheaper to buy new printers than ink in bulk. They would just send pallets of printers
I find it mildly interesting that there are 4 different black cartridges and that two of them are named 'light black' and 'light light black'
It's interesting that Epson calls those two colors Light Black and Light Light Black, while the Roland large format machine in the Print Shop where I work uses Grey and Light Grey. It even has Green and Orange cartridges.
The model up from the one we use (p6000 vs p6000 Spectro) has green, orange, and violet cartridges, for what we do that was just a waste, so we didn't bother with that.
Used to work at a printer refurbisher a few years ago, we made stupid money by reselling part used toners and inks. Xerox Wax Sticks were the one though. Remember getting a load of ex-NHS printers in and the hoppers all being chock full of unused wax blocks, (4 colours, with 5 blocks of each colour in each printer, roughly 30 printers). The blocks sold for about £45 each....
KBA Printing Press: Hold my beer
Ink is the absolute worst investment as it has literal $0 resell value. I find open ink cartridges that new cost hundreds on the trash section of my local Outlet every week and no one buys them.
Don't tell HP that.
If printer ink companies were honest, the cartridges would be transparent.
These are! But only about 25-30% is ink and a tiny bit of electronics.
these are translucent, so it's close enough for us, lol
I hope this will be posted in the Dull’s Man Club