[biz-engineer]

TBH if you are looking to purchase a pro printer you will need to make a decision to use either OEM or cheap ink, best practice is not to mix. You also need to be aware that cleaning cycles could use 30% of your ink cartridge for cleaning and account for that in your costings.

I've read in a forum thread cost statistics from a Canon Pro 1000 user, printing 1000 A2 prints over something like 5 years, ink wasted in cleaning cycles / maintenance tanks was around 50% of total ink. Only 50% went onto paper, even when printing multiple times each week. My conclusion is that those Canon inkjet systems are designed for production, not at all for occasional use.

[beholder3]

I think the bigger question is if ink jet printers make a lot of sense at all if you can get very cheap printouts everywhere as well as top quality ones for higher prices.

[biz-engineer]

I think the bigger question is if ink jet printers make a lot of sense at all if you can get very cheap printouts everywhere as well as top quality ones for higher prices.

The market forces are such that it cost about the same to have my own printer or outsource to high-end lab or low cost lab. That's what makes the decision difficult. Owning the printer equipment is a long term commitment, there is no long term commitment that comes with outsourcing to external labs, but there are the shipping costs, shipping delays, out of control quality, limited choice of papers and poor (or non-existant) customer service. If I want to make a print from a lab with Canon Infinity Fiber Rag, the closest to Budapest Hungary or Germany (boutique lab that do no better than home owned inkjet printer) or UK etc etc. Otherwise if I'm happy with two choices of Hahnemühle papers I go to Whitewall or Saal Digital in Germany, they offer two types of papers that are outdated by 2021 (there are better choices from Canson and other brands from the USA). At Saal-Digital, I got color shift on 50 Euros prints and customer service was completely useless, so I stopped ordering fineart prints to them (I only order Fuji C-prints from them). Whitewall do an excellent job regarding color calibration for prints, but price is about 65 euros for a 60x80cm prints, without shipping costs (I could make the same print for about 15 euros if I printed myself with the same equipment). For a true B&W print, WhiteWall can charge >100 euros a print, not cheap at all. I can get a good choice of papers and high quality in Paris at Picto, but pricing is the same as WhiteWall and shipment to Austria costs more than 15 euros (yep... 15 euros only for the shipment even for an empty box.). Now, I can get a 70x100 print from Cewe foto service for 20 euros and pick it up at selling point downtown at almost zero shipment costs and 10 days delivery time (more like two weeks), but at that level of quality (cheap Canon 240gms RC paper on 8 colors inkjet plotter) I can print it for 5 euros (paper+ink) at home if I would own a printer with 12 colors (even better quality). So, having my own printer can be an advantage, but with the pain of having to sign-up for monthly 30 euros of ink wasted "down the toilets" whether I print or not. If I could trust lab to be color accurate without charging 100 euros a print, I'd have not hesitation to go for labs all the way, unfortunately, either it is high quality and fairly expensive, or cheaper with quite significant quality excursions. Plus when I was absent at the time of the parcel delivery and I ended up having to drive 35km in the middle of the day just to pick-up a photo print somewhere at a distant warehouse (super experience! yeah, I loved it).

[madbrain]

I've read in a forum thread cost statistics from a Canon Pro 1000 user, printing 1000 A2 prints over something like 5 years, ink wasted in cleaning cycles / maintenance tanks was around 50% of total ink. Only 50% went onto paper, even when printing multiple times each week. My conclusion is that those Canon inkjet systems are designed for production, not at all for occasional use.

Not sure about the Pro 1000. But on the Pro 100, it would surprise me if it was anywhere near that high. I can see 20%, but not 50%.
The problem is when you don't print for 6 months at a time, and then you have to unclog the head, and do multiple cleaning cycles. You do waste time doing that.

BTW, if you flush Pro 100 cartridges, you can dry them quickly in the oven at 180 degrees F for a few hours, rather than waiting a few days. I did this last week.

[TonyW]

My understanding of Canon printers (pro, semi pro) is that they will automatically perform cleaning cycles if your printer is idle for more than 60 hours. Additionally each doubling of the idle times doubles the amount of ink wasted.

Having to do a deep clean may actually use up to 2 ml of ink (this is a guess on my part!) compared to the relatively miniscule amount used for printing a nozzle check (may be 0.10 ml - another guess!)

If you can get hold of a service manual for your printer the amount of ink used for cleaning will probably be declared somewhere.

So it would seem sensible to use a little ink often, (e.g. print a nozzle check inbetween timer settings) to save triggering deeper cleaning cycles. This should actually save ink costs in the long run.

One of the problems associated with cleaning cycles is that often there are only one or two colours where the heads are causing issues, but the printer system does not allow individual colour purge but purges all heads. One way around this may be to use printer purge files which only purge the individual channels. One such supplier is Marrutt and some specialist printing software such as Qimage have the same function.

Marrutt printer purge files

https://www.marruttusa.com/printer-maintenance/inkjet-printer-purge-files.php

[biz-engineer]

Not sure about the Pro 1000. But on the Pro 100, it would surprise me if it was anywhere near that high. I can see 20%, but not 50%.

Thank for the experience feeback. The reason why I wrote that maintenance ink was 50% of total ink consumption was because I read a report from a Canon Pro1000 user here: Update 26 Nov. 2020: Printers and Printing Forum: Digital Photography Review

This user wrote that when he printed 100 A2/month the consumption was 80/20 (80% on ink on paper, 20% in maintenance tanks), and when he printed 6 A2/month the consumption was 30/70 (30% on ink on paper, 70% in maintenance tanks).

[madbrain]

One of the problems associated with cleaning cycles is that often there are only one or two colours where the heads are causing issues, but the printer system does not allow individual colour purge but purges all heads.

On the Pro 100, you can do a cleaning in 2 separate groups of 4 colors, or all colors if the nozzle check pattern shows issues on just a few.

However, when you replace any single ink cartridge, the printer runs a cleaning cycle on all 8 colors, because it can't tell which one you replaced.

The best way to minimize ink loss from purges is to always replace all cartridges even if only a single one runs low/dry.
This is practical only if you use refillables, of course.

I haven't noticed cleaning cycles ever 60 hours, but my printer is in the room way in the back of the house that I rarely set foot in, so I could have easily missed it.

---------- Post added 04-17-21 at 05:10 PM ----------

Thank for the experience feeback. The reason why I wrote that maintenance ink was 50% of total ink consumption was because I read a report from a Canon Pro1000 user here: Update 26 Nov. 2020: Printers and Printing Forum: Digital Photography Review

This user wrote that when he printed 100 A2/month the consumption was 80/20 (80% on ink on paper, 20% in maintenance tanks), and when he printed 6 A2/month the consumption was 30/70 (30% on ink on paper, 70% in maintenance tanks).

Thanks for that thread. I think the Pro 1000 and Pro 100 are sufficiently different printers that the stats would be quite different. The Pro 1000 uses pigment ink, which is more prone to drying and clogging heads than dye ink. It also has more ink cartridges.

I have only bought ink a few times for my Pro 100, from Precision colors. My last PC ink purchase was 3 years ago, before they changed to a new formulation. I bought 8 16oz bottles. So I'm using their old ICC profiles. I'm not a pro, and I'm not doing a huge number of large prints. I do have about 300 sheets of A3+ paper left. If I printed them all, I would probably run out of ink.

[TonyW]

On the Pro 100, you can do a cleaning in 2 separate groups of 4 colors, or all colors if the nozzle check pattern shows issues on just a few.

However, when you replace any single ink cartridge, the printer runs a cleaning cycle on all 8 colors, because it can't tell which one you replaced.

The best way to minimize ink loss from purges is to always replace all cartridges even if only a single one runs low/dry.
This is practical only if you use refillables, of course.

I haven't noticed cleaning cycles ever 60 hours, but my printer is in the room way in the back of the house that I rarely set foot in, so I could have easily missed it.
......

I am sure your assesment of the printer is more accurate than my guesses. It may be that the different Canon models have different requirements and I would assume that the pigment ink systems likely to trigger more cleaning cycles due to the nature of the medium.

EDIT:I think I may be wrong about printing a nozzle check will hold of the cleaning cycles, at least for Canon (some?). It may be that the cleaning cycle will be triggered automatically according to the internal timers and this may be 120 hours and not based on when a real print was made?
http://ddisoftware.com/tech/printers/canon-pixma-pro-100s-cleaning-cycles/

[Mooncatt]

For photos, I use a dedicated service. Four general use printing, I have a basic HP inkjet printer/scanner. One thing you may want to consider is HP's Instant Ink service. I only recently started it, but it's an ink subscription service. Only specific printers are compatible because they have to be able to send ink level reports to their server. When you start to run low, they automatically send new ink cartridges. Because I don't print much, I'm on the $1/mo plan, which is good for an estimated 3 pages a month. If you don't print much at all, that's not a bad price just to run the occasional test page to prevent clogging. They offer higher tier subscriptions for more frequent use too. I think the next level up is $3/mo for an estimated 15 pages per month printing.

The caveat is the cartridges are electronically tracked. If you sign up to get the first round for a few bucks and then cancel, the printer will see the subscription cancellation and not allow you to print unless you re-subscribe or swap to non-Instant Ink cartridges. I found that out the hard way when I got what I thought was simply a trial run of the service free with the printer, but cancelled because I didn't actually intend to use it. At the time, the $3/mo level was the cheapest and not worth it for me. It wasn't until months later when I tried to print again and got an error that I learned of the cartridge tracking.

[biz-engineer]

When you start to run low, they automatically send new ink cartridges. Because I don't print much, I'm on the $1/mo plan, which is good for an estimated 3 pages a month. If you don't print much at all, that's not a bad price just to run the occasional test page to prevent clogging. They offer higher tier subscriptions for more frequent use too. I think the next level up is $3/mo for an estimated 15 pages per month printing.

They typically make no profit on the printer machines. It's selling the ink that makes the most money. It looks like the same model is applied for larger printers, but the larger the printer the more expensive is the printer and the least expensive is the ink. The biggest ink cartridges of Canon (700ml) cost about 30 cents per ml of ink (smaller model possible for 700ml tanks is the Pro 2000/Pro 2100), typically used on the 44"/60" printers (Pro 4000 and up) that cost more than $4000. For smaller printers, the ink cost $1 or more per ml, the printers being sold for less than $100.