Is there a way to measure the amount of ink required to print a page? (1 Viewer)

[prabha_friend]

Is there a way to measure the amount of ink required to print a page? (Before Printing)

Hi All,
I and my friend are planning to partner a DTP Centre (Desktop Publishing)

Printing a text page is okay but I know that some of our future customers will surely bring large pictures or logos to print.

I have decided to have a special quote for that kind of multimedia printing... Inks are costly. Please Help. Thank You.

With Hope,
Prabhakaran

Crossposted Here

 

[CJ_London]

you would need to refer to the printer specifications to get some idea of consumption for full, saturated colour. Mine gives an estimated number of pages a cartridge will print but I've never done any checks as to how accurate that is. Would think the specialised paper you would need to print large pictures to use will cost more and may also up the consumption.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Is there a way to measure the amount of ink required to print a page? (Before Printing)

I suppose it is possible that you could write code that opened some utility that Access could use and then looked at every report before you printed it. You could count characters in every control (including labels), noting their font characteristics such as density, size in points, and other features like "Bold" or "Italic" and "Underscore" - but that isn't enough, since there is ALSO the matter of shading and backgrounds, such as white print on black background, or a "watermarked" page with a company logo. Then, you have the issue that one picture consumes as much ink as two or three pages of dense print or more equivalent pages than that with normal print density. There will also be differences in how much ink is used for .JPG vs. .WMF vs. other picture formats since printers do not treat such things uniformly. AND of course if someone brings you a file in a format that Access cannot open (because either the format doesn't expose its structure or it would but you don't have the right .DLL file), you would have no way to develop an ink-usage result.

Tracking such a thing would be incredibly hard and it would be trivially easy to miss something in trying to program this ink estimator tool. The more you try to pre-analyze this, the harder you make it for yourself. I'm noted for being fairly self-confident, sometimes to the point of being a bit arrogant in my ability to program difficult problems. This is one I wouldn't touch at any low level.

The point of me saying this is that I think you would do better to just develop page-level statistics that tell you "on the average, printing x pages in black-only will consume 1 cartridge. Printing y pages in color will consume 1 set of color cartridges." Start with the vendor's statistics on how many pages you can get as the basis for your rate charges. Then adjust your pricing accordingly according to pages printed by giving everyone a pro-rated share based on page count.

With per-page statistics, if you discover you have not been charging enough, just announce a price adjustment. It will be FAR easier to do this statistically. AND you can just figure in the paper cost, ink cost, and printer wear/maintenance/eventual replacement costs into the paper cost.

 

[CJ_London]

Many years ago I was accountant to a print company - they specialised in flexible packaging for chocolate bars, frozen food, crisp snacks and the like. We had two different printing methods of flexo and gravure plus offset gravure which was a combination of both. The point was costing for ink was almost impossible - yes we had the nominal volume required which is what we costed/sold out at, but that volume was modified with the use of solvents and thinning agents so it was common to book out say 20 litres of a particular colour but return 25 litres. We looked at using viscosity as a measure to try to determine the relative volumes of ink and solvent, but just wasn't reliable enough.

So to control this we used a technique called standard costing. We charged to the ink standard cost account the standard cost of the ink based on nominal volume at a standard price so we knew what we were recovering and set this against stock usage which was determined by stock purchases adjusted for stock takes. Every 3 months we would do the comparison and look forward the next 3 months for any potential price changes and adjust the standard price if required.

Inks were grouped - some were specialist - a customers copyrighted colour for example and some were just in different price bands but we were able to establish a cost difference and a volume difference for each group.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

CJ's answer was based on experience. My answer was based on ab initio computation attempts. We both come to the same conclusion. Standardize your costing based on statistics. You'll sleep at night with far less worry - and your competitors will do no better because they will probably be doing the same thing anyway.