Epson’s SureLab D1070 Professional Minilab Printer has a compact foot print, a robust industrial build, a low acquisition cost, and professional photo lab print quality. So what’s the catch? How much does it cost to make photo prints? It must be a million dollars. That’s how they get you right? Watch our video below to find out how much it costs to print on the Epson SureLab D1070 and if indeed that is “how they get you” with this printer!
For years Epson has been the leader in wide-format ink jet photographic printing. In 2012 Epson brought their expertise to the digital dry lab with the SureLab D3000. Since then they have refined their high speed photo offering to a compact mini-lab. The all-new SureLab D1070 is the third generation of the Epson mini-lab and offers excellent print quality and production speeds in a tiny desktop footprint.
The D1070 is capable of printing up to 8” wide. Standard rolls are 5”, 6” and 8” wide by 200+ feet. The D1070 will print and cut four-sided borderless prints in these standard roll widths, allowing for high-speed, finished, photographic prints in all the standard sizes: 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, as well as custom sizes. The D1070 will handle matte, satin, glossy, metallic and any number of photo papers in-between.
In a future video, we’ll test Epson’s top speed claims of 460 4×6 prints in an hour, but today we’re going to focus on print costs. Can a printer that only costs $2600 really compete in a cost per copy world with printers that cost literally 100x more? Today we’re going to break down the math on the ink and paper costs for the Epson SureLab D1070.
The Epson D1070 uses their tried-and-true UltraChrome D6 inks that produce best-in-class image quality in previous SureLab printers. This 6 color ink set offers photo prints that are water, smudge, and fade-resistant. The inks in this printer are 250 ml eco bags that snap into the printer. Each bag costs $55 for a per ml cost of $.22. Make note of that as we’re going to circle back to this $.22 per ml cost later in the video.
Today we are going to print 4 representative photographic prints: a family portrait, a black and white print, a school portrait, and a landscape photography print. We are printing these on 6” paper at a size of 4”x6”.
So here is our printed output. Our first input cost is the paper. For these prints we used our Simply Elegant Luster paper in 6”x213’ rolls. The cost for these are $71 per roll. So on a 213’ roll that is 2,556 linear inches of paper. If we divide that by 4” for our 4”x6” print size we find that you can get 4×6” prints from a roll. Lets factor in some waste and call it 630 prints. That will give us a paper cost of $.11 per 4”x6” print.
Now please note that this is a premium paper. We work with custom mills that can convert much more economical papers into a size that the D1070 can handle. If you’re doing invites, postcards, holiday cards, or any other number of applications that don’t require a premium photographic paper, you could find this cost closer to $.05 per 4×6 print.
So now that we have our paper cost of $.11 per 4×6 we now need to calculate our ink cost. In order to do that we need to know how much ink was used on each of these prints. You can easily calculate this using Epson’s Cloud Solution Port fleet monitoring tool. In fact you could have a bank of 6, 12, 50 of these and monitor the up time, print totals, and ink usage on each printer individually or in custom groups. This is a powerful tool that can allow you to run these small D1070’s in a large scale production environment.
So how much ink did we use on each print? On the school portrait we used .09 ml of ink, on the black and white print we used .1 ml of ink, on the landscape print we used .13 ml of ink, and on the family portrait we used .1 ml of ink. Across the 4 prints we used .42 ml of ink total, for an average ink usage of .1 ml per 4”x6” print.
Remember that the D1070 uses 250 ml eco bags of ink at a cost of $55 per bag or $.22 per ml. If we take our average ink usage of .1 ml per 4×6 we can multiply it by $.22 for an average cost of 2.3 cents in ink per 4×6 print. So each 4×6 print will use an average of 2.3 cents in ink.
So if we take our paper cost of 11 cents per 4×6 and our ink cost of 2.3 cents per 4×6 then we arrive at a total consumable cost of 13.3 cents on our Premium Simply Elegant Luster paper. If you use a less expensive paper you could effectively bring this cost per print down below $.10 per 4×6.
And this would be a good place to stop if you just want to know your consumable cost. But lets take it one step further. The printer costs $2600 and comes with a 1 year warranty. It is rated for 400,000 prints and can be warrantied for 5 years at a cost of $195 per year. That means for $3,380 you can buy an Epson D1070 and put it under full warranty for 5 years. If anything breaks on the printer, Epson ships you a replacement printer Next Day Air.
Why do we say all this? Well, if you take your all-in 5-year equipment cost of $3,380 and you print 400,000 prints, which Epson says the printer is rated for, then your cost per print on those 400,000 prints is 8 one hundredths of a penny. The equipment cost spread to each print is less than a tenth of a penny. So if you want to take that cost and add it to your ink costs, your ink cost goes from 2.3 cents per 4×6 to a total equipment and ink cost of 2.4 cents per 4×6.
That is just a ridiculous amount of printing that you can accomplish for a $3400 investment. And with an attractive ink cost of 2.3 cents per 4×6 and a competitive paper cost of anywhere from $.05 to $.11 per 4×6, I think we’ve answered the question that we set out to answer. Does this Epson Surelab D1070 have a place in an industry with printers that cost 100x more? Yes. And is Epson going to sell you a low cost photo printer and pull one over on you with outrageous ink costs? No, not with the D1070.
If you have more questions about the Epson SureLab D1070 please reach out to our sales team at www.itsupplies.com. We’d love to help you with sampling and testing on this small but powerful photo printer!
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Still have questions regarding the EPSON SureLab D1070 Printer? Call 1-800-771-9665 and ask to talk to one of our commercial sales specialists or visit our website https://www.itsupplies.com.
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