Three printers. All 64 inches wide, all print-only, all within about $2,500 of each other on the quote. Five years later, one of them has cost the shop more than $53,000 more to own than another. And it's probably not the one you'd guess.

I've owned a print shop, and I've spent most of my career on the equipment side for national distributors, so I've sat on both sides of the table when these decisions get made. The sticker price is almost never what decides how much a printer really costs you. Ink, printheads, service, power and the room you print in do. So I ran a full five-year total cost of ownership (TCO) on one machine from each of the three main roll-to-roll ink technologies.

If you'd rather watch than read, the full breakdown is here:

The Bottom Line Up Front

Model: about 101,000 sq ft a year (three 675 sq ft rolls a week, 50 weeks), $0.14/kWh, equal ink use on all three machines, manufacturer advertised pricing with no rebates or trade-ins, lamination excluded. Your numbers will be different, which is the whole point of running your own.

The Three Machines

To keep it apples to apples, I picked one 64-inch, print-only machine per technology and used each manufacturer's advertised price. Prices and promotions change constantly, so always confirm with your dealer.

• HP Latex 630 ($16,445). Water-based latex ink, cured with heat so prints come off dry and ready to handle. HP runs rebates and trade-in deals, but not everyone qualifies, so I used regular price.
• Roland TrueVIS XP-640 ($18,995). Eco-solvent ink that bites into the vinyl coating, which is why it's been the vinyl workhorse for so long. Roland has promoted it as low as $16,995, but promos come and go.
• Mimaki UJV200-160 ($17,675). UV-LED roll-to-roll. The ink cures almost instantly under LED light, with no heat drying at all.

Three completely different ink technologies, and the price spread is only about $2,500. The sticker price isn't going to decide this one. The operating costs are.

Power: Real, But Not the Big One

I used 14 cents per kWh and about 675 printing hours a year. The HP 630 needs 200–240V power with two cords, one for the printer and one for the curing system, and if your shop isn't wired for it, budget around $1,000 for an electrician. After that it costs roughly $130–$200 a year to run. The Roland draws about one kilowatt while printing, which works out to under $100 a year. The Mimaki surprised me. Its peak draw is about 1,320 watts, but its average is around 550, and average is what you pay for. That's only about $50 a year.

The gap between the highest and lowest power bill is only about $600 over five years. Worth knowing, but not where the money goes.

Ink: The Biggest Ongoing Expense

By price per liter:

• HP 832 inks: about $164/L for color, optimizer and overcoat. The optimizer is a required pre-coat, so it's an extra fluid you're always buying. The overcoat is optional and can replace lamination on some short-term indoor jobs.
• Roland TH ink: about $198/L ($99 per 500 mL), the highest of the three. No optimizer or overcoat, but eco-solvent machines purge ink through the heads during startup cleanings, and that adds up, especially after a long weekend.
• Mimaki UV ink: about $140/L, the lowest of the three, with no optimizer or overcoat.

No manufacturer publishes consumption numbers you can compare side by side, so I assumed equal ink use per square foot across all three. That works out to roughly 16¢/sq ft on the HP, 20¢ on the Roland and 14¢ on the Mimaki. Your real numbers depend on coverage and print mode, and the best way to find out is a test print from your dealer on the machine you're considering.

Printheads: The Myth That Sells the Wrong Printer

I can't count how many shop owners have told me they bought HP Latex because they were scared of piezo printheads. They'd heard a piezo head costs a fortune and needs a technician to replace, so they went with the machine where the heads are cheap and you swap them yourself.

Part of that is true. A piezo head for these machines runs around $1,600 and is usually dealer-installed. An HP 836 head runs around $200 and you can change it yourself in a couple of minutes.

Here's what nobody tells you. HP Latex uses thermal inkjet, where a tiny heater fires every drop, and those heaters wear out. You're not replacing those heads once. You're replacing them over and over. HP warrants them to about 1.5 liters of ink. Some shops report five to eight liters with good maintenance, and others see them go much sooner, especially the optimizer head. Averaging everything I found, from the warranty figure to what shops actually spend, I landed at about 8¢ per square foot. At roughly 100,000 square feet a year, that's about $8,100 a year in heads.

Piezo heads don't have heaters to burn out. They flex to fire the ink, and in a well-maintained shop they typically last three to five years. Using a four-year life, the Roland's two heads cost about $800 a year and the Mimaki's single head about $400.

Over five years: $40,500 in heads on the HP, $4,000 on the Roland and $2,000 on the Mimaki. The cheap head turns out to be the expensive one.

UV does carry one head risk the others don't. UV ink can start curing inside the head if the machine sits idle too long or the head is exposed to light, which can mean a permanent clog. Mimaki builds in nozzle check and recovery routines, but the rule with UV is simple: keep it printing.

Warranty and Service

The HP 630 comes with a one-year warranty. The Roland comes with two, but only if you register within 60 days, stay connected to Roland DG Connect, use Roland ink and buy their Care Packs on schedule. Mimaki's coverage varies by model and promotion, so get the exact terms from your dealer. I modeled it the same as the Roland.

On the HP, I budgeted about $1,400 for a Care Pack in year two and about $2,800 a year from year three on, plus $440–$890 a year in maintenance kits. That's roughly $13,300 in service and maintenance over five years. On the Roland and Mimaki, I treated years one and two as covered and budgeted about $2,400 a year for a service contract in years three through five, plus a few hundred dollars a year in cleaning supplies for the routine maintenance you do yourself.

One more thing on piezo heads: a head that fails from a manufacturing defect under warranty is covered. A head strike, abuse or neglect is not. Keep your media flat and stay on top of maintenance, because a head strike on a $1,600 head is an expensive lesson.

The Room You Print In

This is where HP Latex earns its money back. Latex inks are water-based with very low emissions, so you can run one in an office or right next to your customer counter with no exhaust system at all.

Eco-solvent inks are lower in VOCs than full solvent, but not zero. There's a smell, and the ink can irritate skin and eyes, so plan on ventilation. I budgeted $500 for an exhaust fan. The bigger issue is off-gassing. Prints need to sit before you laminate, typically 24 hours and anywhere from 8 to 48 depending on conditions. You print today, laminate tomorrow, and need floor space in between. That makes true same-day print-and-laminate jobs really tough, even on a fast machine.

UV doesn't have that problem. The ink cures instantly with no off-gassing, so you can laminate right off the printer. UV curing does produce a little ozone, so you still want decent air exchange, but it's nothing like the eco-solvent picture. For same-day work, HP Latex and UV both handle it well.

What You Can Print

• Durability: HP rates Latex at up to three years outdoors unlaminated and up to five laminated. Roland rates its TH ink at about two years outdoors, extended with lamination. UV depends heavily on the ink and media combination, but prints come off with very good scratch resistance.
• Lamination: Eco-solvent prints scratch easily, so you'll laminate most of them, which adds film, labor and laminator time. With Latex, the overcoat makes lamination optional on a lot of jobs. With UV it's often optional too, though it still helps on long-term outdoor work.
• Media: HP Latex is the most flexible of the three and the only one that reliably handles fabric, which opens up soft signage. Eco-solvent is a vinyl ink first and limited on fabric. UV handles clear films, metallics, holographic and polypropylene that the others struggle with, but standard UV ink can crack on heavy-stretch jobs like vehicle wraps unless you run a flexible UV ink.

How Long Do These Printers Last?

A five-year comparison only tells half the story if one machine is done at five years and another is still running at ten. There's no published number for any of these, so this comes from industry ranges and shop owners who've run this equipment for years.

Eco-solvent has the best track record, and it's not close. The machines are mechanically simpler, and I know shops running the same eco-sol printer seven, eight, even ten years later. Latex usually lands a notch below, more in the five-to-seven-year range. UV-LED is the one I can't give you a long track record on yet. You'll hear three to five years, maybe seven with good care, but the LEDs themselves are rated for tens of thousands of hours, so I wouldn't be surprised if that number climbs.

Printers rarely just die, though. What gets a machine replaced is the repair math: parts get harder to find, repair bills stack up, or a newer machine just makes more sense for where your business is going. The real question isn't how long it will last. It's how long it will still make sense to keep running.

Who Should Buy What

Choose HP Latex if you want a clean, odor-free shop with no ventilation to worry about, if you do fabric, textile or wall covering work alongside vinyl, or if same-day turnaround is a big part of your business. Just go in knowing it's the most expensive of the three to own, and most of that is printheads.

Choose eco-solvent if your work is mostly vinyl, you want a proven machine that'll still be running ten years from now, and you have room for ventilation and an overnight off-gassing rack. It's fast and dependable, and Roland rates the XP-640's top speed at about 819 sq ft an hour, but with off-gassing and most jobs needing lamination, a lot of that speed turns into hurry up and wait. Keep an eye on ink costs, because that's where eco-sol gives back what it saves on heads.

Choose UV roll-to-roll if you want the lowest cost to own, you print on specialty media like clear films, metallics or polypropylene, or you want white and clear ink for layered work. It also gives you same-day work without the off-gassing wait, at a lower operating cost than latex. Just make sure your volume is steady, because UV doesn't like to sit idle, and if you do a lot of wraps, look at a flexible UV ink.

Run Your Own Numbers

No single ink technology is the right answer for every shop. But don't let the sticker price make the decision for you, and don't let a myth about printheads either. Five years from now, the price on that quote will be a small slice of what you actually spent.

Every number in this post came from the free Graphic Insights TCO Calculator. Plug in any three printers you're considering, along with your own volume and power rate, and it gives you a real five-year number instead of a sales rep's ballpark.

Get the Free TCO Calculator

Shopping for a printer right now? Leave a comment on the video and tell me what you're looking at. I read every comment.

For the bigger-picture version of this decision, see Solvent, UV, or Latex: How to Choose the Right Wide Format Technology for Where Your Shop Is Going.

— Mike Goodwin, Graphic Insights