I spend some time and $$ to test when is the printer wasting ink. There is a timer reseted on every print and when you turn it on or print the next image you get some cleaning depending on how long it was not used. There is also 0.05 grams of ink going in the tank on every print...
Great investigation work, Sabin. Thanks for sharing!
I'm also noticing and investigating some heavy waste of the Pro-1000, some color management errors, inconsistencies in custom media types etc, and can appreciate how much effort it takes.
I've had the maintenance cartridge fill with 300g of ink with less than 40ml of ink put on paper according to the accounting tool (initial set of inks still in use). And 50g of ink put in new waste cartridge in one go on startup after having replaced full maintenance cartridge after a week or more of stand still. That's quite a dump in one go.
Have you looked into the effect of the settings here, regarding automatic nozzle checking and system cleaning frequency?
Auto maintenance settings (link to manual=
Would be interesting to know their effect in regards to your thorough tests.
Also looking forward to your 20+ days results.
The second set of maintenance you mention (with timer between print maintenance) - is that dump done before or after the print is made?
Does it seem a little odd that the printer according to your data does both a power-on maintenance _and_ a second similar large maintenance dump on first print, e.g. ~2+2g after 2 days or 3+3g after 4+ days of shutdown? It seems a lot with the second dump right after the startup dump... Bug or different purposes of the two, both needed?
In your original post on forum.adv-bulgaria.com you mention "Executing power on maintenance does not clear any counters! If you make 10 power on/off in sequence it will waste ink every time, no matter how much time there is from previous power on/off". But the tables list "On after 0-4h: 0 grams". That table entry I would interpret as turning on again within 4 hours would not use an ink on startup maintenance (so not 10x of usage if turning on/off 10 times). Can you help me explain?
Wonder if similar heavy maintenance is being seen on the roll models of the same series, or only is present so significant on the Pro-1000 desktop model.
I'm somewhat shocked to see that a single A4 print, of typically around 1g of ink on paper, after only four days of standstill will utilise around 1 (print) + 3 (startup, 1st type of maintenance) + 3 (second type of maintenance) = 7g of ink in total. That's a 1:6 ratio of ink-on-paper vs ink-wasted! Or less than 15% of ink use put on paper, or the price of that single print being 6 times more expensive in ink that what's put on paper.
Printing once every day can still waste >2g a day if I understand the data correctly. A year like this could be ~10 full cartridges of ink waste. Doing one A4 of 1g a day makes this roughly 1:2, meaning twice as much wasted ink as ink on paper. Doing 2 A4 or 1 A3 every day gets you to 1:1 in ink TCO. Still surprising to me given daily continuous use of printer, dumping as much as is used on paper, effectively doubling ink costs compared with accounting manager.
I haven't seen this data included in reviews. Have seen some more fluffy mentioning of the always general expectation that some ink is wasted for regular maintenance, that it's good to keep the printer running without too many standstills, that initial setup runs through a lot of ink (not just filling lines and reservoirs, but also through to waste cartridge) etc, but non I have seen have noticed the amount shown here. And your data seems to not be related to initial setup, but for continued normal usage. That surely gives a vastly different total cost of ownership / printing than indicated many places. I'd like more reviewers to dig into this for better info, as the waste seems very significant even with frequent printing.