Roland DG: track ink consumption and print costs

Roland DG ink consumption on the Eco-Solvent machines of the TrueVIS series lives in the RIP and in the job history. It is measured precisely there, but hard to reach when you want reliable prices from it. Without saved figures, every square metre price stays a guess. Printometer keeps this kind of data for good and turns it into real cost per print job. For the Roland DG, this connection is in the works.

What the Roland DG knows about its costs - and what disappears

The TrueVIS printers from Roland DG run on Eco-Solvent ink and combine printing and cutting in one pass. They are usually driven through the RIP VersaWorks, which manages every job. That is where the figures a clean calculation needs are kept.

VersaWorks records the ink used, the media and the printed area for each job. This is the basis for dependable cost per square metre. The catch is reach. Such job data lives in the RIP and on the machine, and over time it gets overwritten or cleaned up. If you do not save it regularly, you lose the history and with it the basis for any later analysis.

Capture Roland DG ink consumption automatically (planned)

For the Roland DG this connection is not live yet, it is on the roadmap. Here is how it will work. A small program in your shop, the collector, will pull the job and ink data from VersaWorks on a fixed schedule. This is meant to run without manual work, just as it already does for the machines that are connected today.

The figures then flow into a cloud hosted in the EU and stay there for good, with no expiry date. A fleeting job history turns into a complete record. If you run a Roland DG and need this connection, join the waiting list. That way we shape the work around real machines and real data.

From consumption to calculation

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

In the end you see solid figures instead of gut feeling. The real ink cost per square metre, the cost per job and the totals per material and machine. A design with heavy coverage becomes visibly more expensive than a simple job, and your quote can reflect that cleanly. This analysis is ready today, and as soon as the Roland DG is connected, its data will feed into the same figures.

Other machines

Connected and live today are the Canon Colorado and the Epson SureColor. The Roland DG follows step by step. For an overview of the whole topic, see the guide Print costs in large format.