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How Much Ink Do Inkjet Printers Use?
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Last Updated
22nd of August, 2011
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We're asked this one all the time - but unfortunately there is no good answer.

Because of the way inkjet printers mix tones, the total ink usage varies VASTLY with the nature of the images you are printing.  If you're printing high key images, then you will use far less ink than very saturated dark images.  Page coverage of course makes a difference, as does how clean you keep your printer, what sort of paper you're using etc. etc.

Here's a decent rule of thumb though - on average, all things considered including head cleans etc., we find that roughly 0.5ml to 1.2 per full coverage A4 page on fine art matte paper is a reasonable (but rather wide) guesstimate.  To put this in context, this means a complete set of cartridges for the Epson 3880 (some 720ml of ink) will result in about 600 to 1200 A4 prints depending on what the actual images are.  And being any more accurate than that is pretty much impossible unless you know exactly what you're printing and you're printing that same thing over and over again. 

When planning ink usage here, we conservatively use 1ml per A4 in our calculations but almost always find that is higher than we actually use. 

There are plenty of other thoughts and calculations on this topic - here, here, here and here.
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