Canon Colorado: track ink consumption and print costs

Canon Colorado ink consumption is measured quite precisely by the machine, but it keeps that to itself, and after a short while the value is overwritten. For pricing, that is a problem. Without a secured record, every price per square metre stays a guess. Printometer pulls exactly this data before the machine forgets it, and turns it into real costs per print job.

What the Canon Colorado knows about its costs - and what disappears

The Colorado keeps an accounting log through its web interface. Per job it holds the ink used per colour channel, the print mode, the material width and length used, and the printed area. That is the basis of any clean calculation.

The catch is the reach. The machine retains these logs only for a limited window, after which the oldest entries drop off. Skip regular backups and you lose the history. The Colorado does not expose an SNMP status over the network, so the consumption data comes solely from the accounting log.

Track Canon Colorado ink consumption automatically

Printometer is live in use here. A small program in your shop, the collector, signs in to the Colorado's web interface on a fixed schedule and downloads the new accounting data. It runs with no manual work, and the open, still-running day is handled cleanly too.

The values flow together in a cloud hosted in the EU. There they stay for good, with no expiry date. A fleeting log inside the machine becomes a gap-free history you can still evaluate months later.

From consumption to calculation

The measured consumption is one half, the prices are the other. In Printometer you store the ink price per litre and the material price per square metre, each with a valid-from date. From that the analysis calculates the cost per job.

In the end you see reliable metrics instead of gut feeling. The real ink cost per square metre, the cost per order, and the totals per material and time period. A white print mode with high coverage becomes visibly more expensive than a simple CMYK job, and your quote can reflect that.

Other machines

The Canon Colorado is the first supported machine, and right alongside it stands the Epson SureColor. More models follow step by step. For an overview of the whole topic, see the guide Print costs in large-format printing.