All of the Latex printers have key software components which allow you, the user,
to be more effective at what you do.
The embedded web server, which for most of you is the IP address of the printer, allows
you to communicate to the printer from your computer.
That's how you send information back and forth.
That's how you can read and identify all the features on the printer.
It's our customer involvement program.
It's our way to send presets in and out of the printer.
So, if I gave you an OMS preset, you can bring it in through the embedded web server.
It's all the service tabs.
It's all the maintenance.
There's a great deal of information there.
And I always encourage people to spend a couple hours and really look around in it.
There's a lot of security features.
But one of the key features that everyone likes is the accounting feature.
The HP printers have a developed and robust accounting feature on the printer.
And it's through the embedded web server.
Unlike many of our competitors, we're not guesstimating.
We're not using the RIP to predict how much ink you're going to use.
What we do is, we actually have all of the ink shipped, all of the use shipped, and every
last drop, down to three decimal points off the picoliter, is calculated for on the printer.
So, after I print something, I know exactly how much ink I used.
I know much square footage I used.
I know how much ink I used.
And I know how much it cost to run the media, if I put that information in.
In the embedded web server, you can enter in your full consumable costs.
And we have formulas for it.
For example, normally what I put in for a Latex 360 is one hundred and thirty-five dollars
for the ink.
I add twenty dollars for the expected life of the print… printhead.
And then another ten dollars for the anticipated life of the cleaning cartridge.
I have a total, general retail price of one hundred and sixty-five dollars for every ink cartridge.
That includes all consumable; all consumables.
OK.
We, we know that the printhead has a lifespan, and we now… the cleaning cartridge has a lifespan.
Now, a lot of our competitors will say that their piezo heads don't break; they do.
It's just, you get longer life and then you have a much higher bill that has to be amortized
over the life of the printer.
That gives you the real consumable cost of the printer.
We are giving you the real consumable cost every day, upfront, no evasions.
Full transparency.
And then this software, the embedded web server, you can enter in the cost of your media,
how wide, what it costs.
And then you can add even some fixed costs.
So, when you run a job it calculates all of that together and tells you, this is how much
ink you use, this is how much square footage you use, this is how much your media costs,
how much you used of it.
And this is a fixed cost, for example, to have the operator load the material.
Maybe it takes them 10 minutes to load a roll and take the roll off.
And what is that labor?
That gives you a perfect idea for all your job costs.
And, the whole thing can be exported to Excel, which is a much more sophisticated and robust
program to read that data, draw conclusions, and then control your pricing accordingly.
We give you the best transparency to know exactly how much it costs to run each job.
Now, there is one thing on the accounting software that I wanted to mention, because
I think it's important to understand.
Because it can be a little misleading.
And I think to a degree it could be critically misleading.
So, I want to explain it.
I want to show you how it works.
And what it is, in essence – and I'll kind of go over it real quick because it's real
simple to understand – the printer, through the embedded web server, is calculating the
linear feet from the media.
So, if your media is 36 inches wide, it is calculating the length of what you printed by 36.
Now, that doesn't mean the image you printed was 36 inches wide.
If your image is 24 inches wide, the embedded web server thinks you printed 36 inches wide.
Now, if you print efficiently, and you try to print to the full width of the media, then
the embedded web server's information for the accounting for the square footage will
be very close to what you actually printed.
But if you were to print, say, 24 inches wide on a 36-inch roll, it's going to think that
those two corridors down there were actually printed when in fact, there's no in on them.
And that's going to give you a slightly misleading square footage.
So, it's important for you to understand this, depending on the jobs you run.
So that if things look a little strange, let me just show you how it works, so at least
you understand how it's being tabulated properly.
And that will give you very accurate numbers for how
much it costs per square foot for every job you do.
In this case, I had a file that I printed that I already know in advance is 10.7 square feet.
And yet, the embedded web server is telling me a slightly different number.
Because of those different numbers, if you divide into the amount of ink you use,
which really is then reflected in the cost, it's going to give you different quotes on the
square footage price and they're not going to be entirely accurate.