Ink is a very significant element of digital print costs and monitoring usage accurately on a job to job basis is highly desirable for planning and job costing purposes. Unbelievably, many wide format printers cost significantly more in ink in a year than they cost to buy in the first place.
Setting up Ink Consumption
Go to Queue > Ink Consumption… or click on the Ink Consumption Settings button in the tool bar.
This opens a sheet which allows the user to set monitoring Settings for specific channels, standard and variable dot sizes. Once set up, the information will display calculations of ink use on specific jobs as well as supplying early numerical warnings of ink cartridges running low.
The Dot Size fields allow variable dot users to enter standard sizes for large, medium and small dots in Picolitres.
Standard dot sizes can generally be found in the printer manufacturers handbook. The Format field allows the user to enter the unit of measurement to be used for monitoring ink consumption. In the snapshot above the formula is £0.00, meaning the total will be displayed as £1.15 or similar.
In the example below the format is ml, and uses standard dot increments for Mimaki JV5 and JV33 models.
Actual Dot Sizes
Large: 21 Picolitres; Medium: 14 Picolitres; Small: 7 Picolitres; Format: ml
So entered values would be:
Large: 21e-9; Medium: 14e-9; Small: 7e-9; Format: 0.# ml
This example shows the user wanting the units in Millilitres, however the initial dot size is in Picolitres. The entered values will show e-9 placed after the number. This indicates the number of zeros after the initial picolitre value.
(0.0000000021 millilitres = 21 picolitres , 9 zeros after 21, therefore the entry is e-9)
For quick and easy conversion to find out how many zeros you need, try a conversion website. Such websites will produce a table of relative unit conversion, alternatively just give AVA Technical Support a call and ask for help.
The Format entry in the example above would result in consumption calculation in ml to one decimal place (0. ## would display two decimal places).
For printers with only a standard dot size setting, only the large size entered is accounted for in the monitor report. Medium and Small are ignored even if values are entered.
| Printer | Large Dot size | Medium Dot size | Small Dot size | Notes |
| DGEN Hex | 26 | 20 | 14 | |
| DGEN G5 | 21 | 14 | 7 | |
| DGEN Papyrus | 7 | 0 | 0 | Not variable dot |
| HP 300-570 | 0 | 0 | 0.001 | This will return ink consumption from Printer |
| HP with IPS | 0 | 0 | 0.001 | On HP IPS |
| Mimaki JV5 | 34 | 18 | 9 | |
| Mimaki TX 300 | 21 | 14 | 7 | |
| Mimaki TX 500 | 25 | 5 | 5 | |
| Rolland | 24 | 12 | 8 | Dot size 4 |
| Printer | Large Dot size | Medium Dot size | Small Dot size | Notes |
| MS JP5 Mode A | 12 | 12 | 12 | |
| MS JP5 Mode B | 18 | 18 | 18 | |
| MS JP5 Mode C | 24 | 24 | 24 | |
| MS JP5 Mode D | 36 | 36 | 36 | |
| MS JP5 Mode E | 36 | 36 | 36 |
Channel selection and naming
It is important to select which channels to monitor. For an 8 colour Mac®hine such as a JV5, for example, users may not be using all 8 ink slots on the printer, and would not want consumption read outs for the unused channels. Channels can be included by ticking the relevant check boxes. Channel numbers can also be changed to names (such as light cyan) if desired by clicking on the channel number and typing in the chosen name.