What does 5% page coverage look like? December 10, 2009 14:47 by Huw Carrington
We’re regularly asked by our customers how many pages a given cartridge should print, to which the answer is however many sheets at a five percent yield.
Not many people know what this 5% figure means, so read on to learn where it came from, what it means and the implications for your printing.
Where Did 5% Page Coverage Come From?
The ISO (the International Organisation for Standardisation) set this 5% measurement to help manufacturers clearly state how many pages their cartridges could print.
To do this, they had to create a standard document to measure print yields across various printers. This document is the ISO/IEC 24712:2006 (now revised as the ISO/IEC 24712:2007). This 5-page document consists of different designs of common printed pages, such as a letter, a presentational document etc.
Interesting fact: There is no standard for photo printing, and no photo is including in the ISO/IEC 24712:2007 set. This is why you will never (or at least SHOULD never) find a photo cartridge with an expected yield.
Using this document set, further standards were created for manufacturers to use to report their page yields, and is obviously dependent on the style and make of your printer:
- Mono + Colour Inkjet printing – ISO/IEC 24711:2006
- Mono Laser Printing - ISO/IEC 19752:2004
- Colour Laser Printing - ISO/IEC 19798:2007
What Do These 5% Standards Tell You?
Basically, these standards allow a manufacturer to calculate how many pages your cartridge can print until it runs dry. Using the ISO set of documents, any new cartridge can be run through a printer in specified printing conditions and produce a set amount of pages. This is the end figure which you see on our website!
How To Measure The Page Coverage Of What You Print
With a little searching, I found a rather good program from AVPSoft that can tell you not only the percentage of a given page that is printed upon, but also the percentages of various shades and colours for further analysis. Using it I tried various common fonts, to try and work out what an average 5% page looks like, and I came up with these sheets (below).
To make sure results were consistent, I used the same sentence repeated as many times as necessary (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog). This means that a standard sheet of five percent is in the region of half a page of normal sized text.
Which Font Can Give You More For Your 5%
Different fonts and sizes will obviously give you different word counts, so I’ve made sure to look at some common fonts in sizes 9-12; in the end I looked at Arial and Times New Roman for everyday use, Calibiri because it’s what MSWord loads with each time I bring it up, Comic Sans because teachers use it, and Tahoma, because it’s quite common… and because a family member asked me to.
There’s simply too much information to clearly describe how well each of these test fonts do at each size, so I fiddled about in MSExcel for a while, and came up with a graph.
It’s pretty obvious to see that Calibri (the red line) is the best font at all tested sizes, while Arial, Comic Sans and Tahoma all performed similarly. Times New Roman was an oddity in that its change from size ten to eleven barely decreased at all, making it good for larger font print jobs.
Not everyone will need to know about page coverage for text, however, so I did a little research on coverage for spreadsheets too. Turns out that a simple numeric table, with 9 columns, 45 rows and 405 cells (the amount that fits on a MSWord A4 page) uses 5.55% of the page without borders, however a similar table (with only 44 rows, and 396 cells – the most with borders that fit on one sheet) with borders uses up nearly double the amount of ink, at 10.89%.
So, next time you receive your borderless table with Calibri font, you know that employee has been reading our work! We hope this helps and you manage to save lots of money, check out the rest of our blog for even more printing tips and advice.
25 Responses to “What does 5% page coverage look like?”
December 21, 2009 11:20
I think this article is phenomenal
December 27, 2009 16:38
Very well done. The example of what 5% on a page looks like would have been enough, but to go beyond and test out the different fonts was huge. Great work.
December 30, 2009 08:26
This is helpful - so if I switch to Calibri before printing, I will save on ink. To be honest, though, switching to a smaller type size would have the same effect - Calibri is actually a smaller font than the others - for example Calibri 12 appears to be about the same size as Arial 10.5.
Regards
StayandShop
December 30, 2009 08:54
Well noticed =) People that don't often fiddle with fonts would not notice/be aware of this, so we thought it would be a handy piece of information to produce anyway! I have never been a fan of Times New Roman, but an extra 40ish words in comparison to arial/comic sans/tahoma may just sway me =)
December 30, 2009 16:56
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January 07, 2010 11:35
Well done - if only all 'infomation' articles were as clear and well researched. Thank you.
January 07, 2010 11:38
P.S I CAN spell 'information' !!
January 07, 2010 12:09
Note that if your quick brown fox "jumped" rather than "jumps", that very clever sentence does not contain an "s". Otherwise, very good!
January 15, 2010 16:17
Thank you Huw, this is very helpful. However with someone with a business like mine, where the cost per page is a direct cost in my product, calculating the exact cost per page is really important. So, are you saying that if I printed in colour, and the replacement toner cost say, £20 with a yield of 2,000 pages, then the cost per page on 5% coverage would be 0.01p. Or would I have to include 3 x £20 (all 3 colour toner cartridges) = £60. Divide this then by 2,000 (assuming all produce the same yield) and the cost per page giving a 5% yield would be 0.03p. Some confirmation here would be really helpful as I have not found confirmation of this, even from the toner manufacturers.
January 15, 2010 17:20
Hello Caroline. Nice website by the way :-)
Just to clarify things a bit for you. WIth your stated values, if you print a page covering exactly 5% of the page, utilising only a single of the 4 available colours (black, cyan, magenta, yellow), the cost will be 1p per page. £20 = 2000p , 2000 page yield, 1p per page.
If you printed a 5% page coverage with an equal usage of all colours, it would remain 1p a page.
£80 for all 4 carts = 8000p , 8000 cumulative page yield , 1p per page.
If you printed 5% coverage of each colour, it would go up to 4p a page cost.
£80 for all 4 carts = 8000p , 2000 page yield , 4p per page.
The issue I can see with your company is your designs are so diverse in their colour and coverage, it is pretty hard to nail down your ink usage. I would recommend actually using the software we used for this article which can be found on the link within the page!
Using this on your design images, you can get feedback on exact colour usage levels and page coverage, which would enable you to compare to cartridge costs and work out your exact printing costs, specific to each design =)
I hope this helps you, glad you found the article useful. Please let us know if it leads to some benefits with you as we are always happy to know we helped :-)