How much does it cost to change the settings on an Epson TM-T20III?

Context

I recently purchased a used Epson TM-T20III thermal receipt printer to tinker with, and I was surprised to discover that— despite the printer only having a single button— you can manipulate its settings without having to use some external app. To do this, the printer prints menus and a user inputs combinations of button presses to navigate through them and modify settings. For example, here’s a video of me adjusting the print speed setting.

And below are scans of each of the menus I navigated through.

Getting to the Point

To answer the question posed in the title: I paid $24.99 for a pack of 10 phenol-free thermal paper rolls. So, about $2.50 per roll. At 230’ of paper per roll, we get a cost per millimeter of $0.00003566\frac{\text{\textdollar}}{\text{mm}}$.

I measured the total length of the paper used in the video above to be 680mm. The cost to change the print speed setting is then:

So, at least for this particular setting and paper roll, the cost is around $0.02.

Wrap-Up

The point of this post isn’t really to figure out how much it costs to change settings on this specific thermal printer. I was just surprised by this interface (which I’ve since learned is standard in most receipt printers) and thought it was particularly interesting and clever.

Anyways, here’s fastfetch.