Calculating exact printing costs is tricky pursuit, on the other hand big-league to create provided you de facto hankering to receive a application on your expenses. You may acquisition, particularly provided you desideratum many copies of the corresponding information, that it is significantly less expensive to outsource the print craft. Let's dawning by crunching some numbers.
Similarly, if you are renting your workspace, your printer has a footprint in the space and therefore you can calculate how much it costs per month to use your printer in the space. For example, if your office is 500 square feet at $1,000.00 per month, you are paying $2.00 per square foot per month. If your printer's footprint is 2 square feet, then it costs you $4.00 per month To possess your printer available. And if you print 200 pages per month, then it cost you $.02 per page in rent.
Calculate how even your paper costs per event. Stare at your obtaining for the paper you purchased (practise trustworthy to combine the toll) and section it by the amount of pages in the packet. Whether your premium glossy photo paper value $12.00 and there were 25 sheets in a pack, then your per folio payment is $.48 ($12.00 divided by 25).
2. Calculate your ink costs per stage. This is the most arduous Reckoning of all, and is individual accurate provided you are able to drop a controlled inspection (described in the later system below). Manufacturers of ink cartridges proportion their cartridges in vocable of character of pages you can print at a sure percentage of ink coverage. For example, whether the manufacturer rated their ebon ink cartridge at 50 pages at 100% coverage, this mode that you could print 50 pages per cartridge, and Everyone chapter would be completely covered in atramentous ink. The bottom line, though, is that pages of paragraph normally exclusive hog a 10% coverage: remainder is alabaster room on the event. That wealth your dusky ink cartridge would print 500 pages of words before needing to be replaced (50 times 10). So whether you are printing matter pages and your jet ink cartridge costs $20.00 and Testament print 500 sheets before needing to be replaced, your ink payment is $.04 per phase ($20.00 divided by 500). Thereupon, your payment per episode for paper and ink is $.52. This Reckoning gets even deeper exhausting, though, when you start adding color cartridges.
3. Run a controlled test. If you are printing many copies of the same color file, buy a new set of ink cartridges for your printer and install them. Then keep track of how many copies you can print before your ink cartridges have to be replaced. For example, say your ink cartridges cost $100.00 and you are able to print 100 copies of a color file that has a 50% page coverage. Your cost is $1.00 per page ($100.00 divided by 100). You can then estimate that if your color file had a 25% coverage, you would get 200 prints and for a 75% coverage you would get 50 prints.
4. Remember to take into account the color palette of your file. If you ran a controlled test as described above, all you will know for sure is how many copies of your test file could be printed before changing cartridges. Most files have individual color palettes. For example, if you are using a lot of blue, your cyan cartridge will run out before your yellow cartridge does. If you are using lots of green, your yellow and cyan cartridges will run out before your magenta cartridge. It is difficult--if not impossible--to predict exactly how many pages you will get out of a set of ink cartridges unless you run a test for each file you plan to print. This is why most designers use a rule-of-thumb that says one color page at 50% coverage uses $1.00 worth of ink. This means that if you have lots of photos on a page (more than a 50% coverage), you may be using $1.25 to $1.75 worth of ink per page instead.
5. Calculate your per-page cost for your printer. Most printers are rated for the number of pages they can print before needing to be replaced. For home inkjet printers, that number is typically 20,000 to 30,000 sheets. If your printer is rated for 25,000 sheets, For example, and it cost you $250.00, then the printer costs you $.01 per page.
6. Add together your direct costs: the cost of the paper per page, the cost of the ink per page and the cost of the printer per page. The sum will be the cost of the materials for each page you print.
7. Add your indirect costs if you want to be maniacal about determining your printing costs. While I do not necessarily recommend figuring costs to this extent, if you are running a business it may be worthwhile. Your printer uses electricity to run, and you need to obtain that electricity. So does your computer, which is giving commands to your printer. You can check the electrical rating of your printer and computer against the total usage of your electricity bill, and then first divide the total usage by the ratings, and then the result by the number of pages you are printing. This will give you an approximate per-page cost for the electricity used to print it.
