Significant Ink Savings Results Using PrintFactory
This week I was working with a new client, they’re primarily a vehicle wrap company. They have 3 Epson S60600’s which came with ONYX Thrive. They print mainly on Avery 1105 and have been using a profile that was available for download. I was explaining to the owner that we could potentially save him a significant amount of money by driving the printers with the Print Factory RIP. He was hesitant to entertaining switching, so I asked if we could do a trial and show him exactly how much he could save.
I stopped over one afternoon this week, we got a trial license created and got the software downloaded, installed, licensed and configured to his 3 S60600’s within 30 minutes. We then created a new PMM (what PrintFactory calls their color setups – acronym Printer, Media, Mode) on the Avery 1105 using the same settings as they have been using for production. Creating custom color setups in PrintFactory is super quick and easy, only a couple charts to print and measure.
Once we had the PMM created we output an Evaluation Test Print, which comes with Print Factory. We output it with 3 of their proprietary rendering intents, which they call “variants” – Visual Match, Visual Match Plus and EcoSave. These variants are only available in PrintFactory and represent some of the secret sauce in why the product works so good – and different from other products. We also output the test print through their existing production workflow.
They were not estimating ink cost/usage, which you can do in several different ways. You should be able to look up the ink usage of each job on the front panel of the printer (in many cases), you can do it most RIP softwares (may be a paid option), or the printer manufacture may offer an application or cloud-based method. Epson has a solution called Cloud Solution Port, which I helped them get configured to report ink usage.
You can see from the terrible screen photo above that they’re existing production output used 2.54ml of ink and that the Visual Match Plus (VMP) variant used 1.87ml of ink – for a savings of 26.38%. The output was better in terms of color accuracy and grey balance, as well.
Obviously, we’ll be moving forward with my recommendation. Now we’ll be creating custom color setups for just one of the printers, on all medias and print modes they use. Once we have those, we’ll recalibrate each on the other 2 printers. PrintFactory will do an amazing job of making all 3 printers match each other. I just thought I’d share the details of the trial and the results.
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