i was wondering if anyone had any data on the cost per square inch/foot for large format printers.

i am currently in the market for a 44 inch printer in a print for pay environment. i am based in the philippines and the prices charged here for those services are nowhere near the prices charged in the US; so cost per square in/ft is very important, especially since qualitywise, these 2 printers are pretty much toe to toe with each other.

i was able to get cost per square foot for the ipf8000 and it's pretty low (compared to epson) in the printworks website. but i could not find any cost estimates as regards to the hp products (either z2100 or the z3100)

I don't have the figures you're after, but in my experience inkjet printing on resin-coated isn't competitive with chromogenic (Lambda etc). Cheap enough to do for yourself, but the margins aren't there for commercial work. Printing on rag or canvas is a different story, and the ink cost for this is likely pretty irrelevant. But by all means do your own sums, and for your own local market.

agwe23 (whatever your name is):

I just looked up the usage figures for my 24" z3100 for the past month and came up with about 2ml total ink use per square foot using glossy/luster papers. If you bought individual ink carts direct from HP (at full retail price) that would be about a dollar per square foot for the ink. You can get the carts cheaper elsewhere, plus can buy twin packs, so that price would be a fair amount lower if you did a lot of printing...

Tim Ernst in Arkansas
http://www.Cloudland.net

The 3100 gives you detailed accounting for every job so at least it is easy to work out exactly each much job costs- much cheaper than an Epson 4000 i hasten to add which you can almost hear greedily sucking away at those 220mil carts (and dumping most of it i n the waste ink tank)

There's one report for the Canon iPF8000 here.
There's a more complete report for a Canon iPF5000 here.