I work at a school and oversee two student-facing Riso labs. Our pricing structures for students fall neatly in line with your per master and page costs (though on the low end - $4 per master and $0.01 per color per page, except Gold, and the minimum charge for anything being $5). What I wanted to share, however, was our tracking of ink usage.
We have 14 drums for our machine, and we *try* to track how many impressions each tube of ink will cover. Averaged out over many years, we're finally getting some usable data.
Accounting for questionable data-keeping on my technicians' part, it seems as though each tube of ink tends to last in the 3000-4500 impression range, with some tubs falling short in the mid 1000s, and some possibly going as far as the 9000s.
This is so useful! I think tube tracking is pretty rare (and when it's done, people are usually just marking ink level with a sharpie before and after a project—are you recording when the tubes are changed?) That sounds about right to me for impression counts, averaged—which I think are somewhat lower than what riso has them spec'd at (which I've seen listed as 5,000)—probably because we are printing often higher coverages than they plan on.
The process is to record the date and Drum Meter Count with every tube change, so we know how long it's been in use, and how many impressions it has run. It has definitely flubbed a few times - we break a drum and swap in a new one so the meter count jumps forwards or back by a few hundred thousand, or we forget to record a tube and suddenly the count is double. The long-term (multi-year) average helps to even this out.
In regards to being below Riso quantity spec, not only do we run higher-coverage prints, but in our studio all jobs are 25-100 prints, below what I expect Riso considers their average count, and so we are always losing ink with master changes.
I work at a school and oversee two student-facing Riso labs. Our pricing structures for students fall neatly in line with your per master and page costs (though on the low end - $4 per master and $0.01 per color per page, except Gold, and the minimum charge for anything being $5). What I wanted to share, however, was our tracking of ink usage.
We have 14 drums for our machine, and we *try* to track how many impressions each tube of ink will cover. Averaged out over many years, we're finally getting some usable data.
Accounting for questionable data-keeping on my technicians' part, it seems as though each tube of ink tends to last in the 3000-4500 impression range, with some tubs falling short in the mid 1000s, and some possibly going as far as the 9000s.
I'm enjoying these posts. Thanks.
This is so useful! I think tube tracking is pretty rare (and when it's done, people are usually just marking ink level with a sharpie before and after a project—are you recording when the tubes are changed?) That sounds about right to me for impression counts, averaged—which I think are somewhat lower than what riso has them spec'd at (which I've seen listed as 5,000)—probably because we are printing often higher coverages than they plan on.
The process is to record the date and Drum Meter Count with every tube change, so we know how long it's been in use, and how many impressions it has run. It has definitely flubbed a few times - we break a drum and swap in a new one so the meter count jumps forwards or back by a few hundred thousand, or we forget to record a tube and suddenly the count is double. The long-term (multi-year) average helps to even this out.
In regards to being below Riso quantity spec, not only do we run higher-coverage prints, but in our studio all jobs are 25-100 prints, below what I expect Riso considers their average count, and so we are always losing ink with master changes.