By Christina Lindsay on January 31, 2012 in
When buying a printer, you have to think about ongoing costs of printing in addition to the price of the printer itself. Manufacturers offer cost per page estimates, and some of the reviews that we researched as we updated our monochrome laser printer report work out real life estimates. However, calculating the cost is not as straightforward as simply dividing the cost of the toner cartridge by the number of pages the manufacturer says it can print . To obtain an accurate running cost, you need to think first about what you'll be printing.
First of all, the printer cartridge that came with your printer probably won't print the maximum number of pages. Many manufacturers ship their printers with "starter cartridges" that don't contain as much ink as a regular, full-price cartridge. In addition, if you've refilled your toner cartridge, it may have a different amount of ink than its original level. Both of these circumstances result in less pages printed and higher per-page printing costs.
If you purchase your toner cartridge from the manufacturer, the estimated number of pages is usually specified, but those numbers are not always helpful. The least useful is when it's expressed as "a yield of up to 5000 pages" or "prints up to 30,000 pages," in the specs of some toner cartridges from Dell. Without knowing how much text was on the test pages, there's no way to know how much ink was used on each page. Thus, it's difficult to tell how many pages you'll get out of a toner cartridge, and you can't compare these numbers across manufacturers.
Much more useful is the information found in the specs from Brother and Canon (and some Dell models). Their specs are more specific. For example, "yields approx. 5,000 pages @ 5% coverage on letter size paper" tells you how dense the text was on their test pages. Most business documents have more than five percent text on each page. If most of your document pages are double spaced, with regular margins, that's about 40 percent coverage, and you'll get significantly fewer pages from your cartridge. If your print coverage is even more dense, perhaps if you print graphics, the yield will be even lower. With this information, it's easier to compare numbers across different printer and toner manufacturers.
The most reliable information about page-per-toner-cartridge is provided with toner cartridges from Hewlett Packard and Samsung. These manufacturers rigorously test their toner cartridges using an internationally recognized testing protocol introduced in 2004 by the International Organization for Standardization. These tests result in standardized page yields that you can accurately compare across printers. The tests are conducted in a controlled environment using a pre-defined test page, in the form of a standard business letter with about 30 percent text coverage, a graphic of a bar chart and a corporate logo. The testing method requires that three different printers are used to test at least nine cartridges. The lowest number of pages produced from a cartridge is the number used in the printer specs. In addition, there are criteria that define when a cartridge is considered to be empty, so that manufacturers can't squeeze out a few extra pages. However, this ISO/IEC 19752 certification is currently only available for monochrome laser toner cartridges.
Regardless of the claims of number of pages per toner cartridge, by reducing the resolution of the printing and saving high resolution for publishing your final draft, you can increase the number of pages that the ink will yield. Choose the draft resolution or your printer's toner-saving mode if it is available.