What does 5% page coverage look like? Dec 10, 2009 15:47 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.
I think this article is phenomenal
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.
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
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 =)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stinky Ink, Valerie Higgins. Valerie Higgins said: RT @stinky_ink Had a great response so far for our Page Yield article to help you save on printing costs. Good stuff. http://bit.ly/6trDFm [...]
Well done – if only all ‘infomation’ articles were as clear and well researched. Thank you.
P.S I CAN spell ‘information’ !!
Note that if your quick brown fox “jumped” rather than “jumps”, that very clever sentence does not contain an “s”. Otherwise, very good!
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.
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
Hello Matt – thank you very much for this suggestion. Have been giving it a trial and it’s been very interesting & useful. You are the only person to be able to give me an intelligent/scientific-ish answer to this Q that I’ve been posing for the last 9 months, so I appreciate it.
Thank you for your nice comments on the website also – I designed & built it myself (I’m an ex-Psychometric Profiler with people strengths not technical strengths) and so I take your comments as a real compliment
BTW, I tell everyone about the business, your great service and great costs. Keep the good work up!
That is great. We hope you continue to see benefits from the software, the detail it goes into for page coverage and colour density is quite something. I am sure you are going to have your hands full comparing base colour usage and depth of the colours in regards to the printing costs. Who knows how much you could save if some of those purples or greens were slightly lighter =)
You built that website with no previous experience? That is even more impressive. It has a very welcoming feel and easy to browse. Though I may now have to stop answering your questions due to you being an ex profiler, don’t want you knowing all of my traits =)
Thank you for telling others about us, we are trying to provide so much more than a retailing company, and are happy whenever one of our information articles is of use to someone. If there is anything else in regards to your personal/business use of printing which you would like research done into then please feel free to email research@stinkyink.com with your request. While we have ideas in the queue for articles, we obviously prioritise the ones we KNOW there is demand for.
Happy Printing!
Incidentally, people are not often aware that the relationship between page coverage and cartridge yields is not linear. Example; just because a cartridge yields 5,000 pages at 5% coverage does not mean it will yield 2,500 pages at 10% coverage. This is a common misconception. My website offers cost calculators (based on US$) that show how much a printer costs at 5% and unfortunately that’s as accurate as we can make it without physically running toner/ink yield tests on each printer’s cartridges. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Hi Andy,
Thank you for raising this issue for us, in hindsight we really should have addressed this briefly in the article. You are completely correct in highlighting the non-linear relationship. Indeed, the 5000 page at 5% starting point, utilising a perfect 5% yield on a page, will not guarantee 5000 pages. In addition to the coverage on a page, variables such as printer settings, paper type, frequency of use, the interval between printing jobs, and environmental conditions can have a significant impact on the yield. For example, a continuous print of 5000 pages of a 5% coverage will use less ink than printing 1000 pages once a week for 5 weeks.
Whilst the relationship will not be linear, the gradient seen in the increased print yield as page coverage goes down should remain reasonably stable, enough so that using the assumption of a linear relationship is a good starting reference for anyone looking at calculating print costs. As long as individuals are aware of some extraneous variables which may impact yield and can keep an eye on them, we are sure benefits can still be seen.
I hope this reply has been helpful – Going into how each variable impacts the yield would have made this article quite meaty, and you are quite right in saying without physical testing of each cartridge, it would be very difficult to get exact yields for differing conditions. However, if others would be interested in knowing more I will happily look into another blog article going into more depth?
Thanks again Andy! Matt
This analysis realy does help to get a grip on understanding the consumption of material.
Thanks – from aged user.
Keith Thomas 80 !
Whoever wrote this analysis, I love you! You answered exactly the questions I would have wanted answered AND you supplied graphic expertise also!
Thank you very much!
Hi there
I’m hoping you may be able to help me…..
Do you know of a product that will analyse a PDF document and provide the following basic information: -
Total number of black pages vs Total number of pages that contain (any) colour?
As said this is from a very basic perspective and therefore the covergae itself is not important, just the page count, i.e. is colour or is it black and white?
I have a company who are looking for this information as they office a service for students printing PDF’s and charge it on a cost per page accordingly.
Many thanks
David
Hiya,
I am just about to self publish a book (3 in fact) and have struggled to work out costs per page having just bought a Brother printer to print saleable quality. (I will only be printing books as ordered, 49 ordered so far even before I finished the book, that’s scary). This article has really helped and I always recommend you to others, would not go elsewhere for ink now. Will be ordering some cartridges soon.
Many thanks
Wendy Usher
The Play Doctors
ref David Tulip’s and Wendy Usher’s notes:
APFill Ink&Toner coverage meter will provide not only data on which pages of a PDF are black & which contain colour, but a detailed and accurate analysis of HOW MUCH black and how much of each colour (C Y M K or RGB, as you please). It’s free to try for 30 days, then $50 (Standard version) to analyse in RGB or $100 (Pro version) to produce the analysis needed for costing black + colour printing. Get it from http://avpsoft.com/products/apfill/
So you can use it to estimage pretty accurately page printing costs, if you have the makers’ 5% coverage data and prices for all your cartridges. It’s a doddle to use. It’s written by Alexey Popov, so I suppose the best comment is “Seemples, Tschik”
Keith Drury
Well thank you guys, this made the vague 5% much clearer. What difference would economy printing mode make? is that still considered a 5% coverage?
Hi Jason,
The 5% coverage figure that this article talks about is based on a standardised set of variables, where printer settings / print requests / paper being used is always the same, so that the figures can be used as a comparison of yields between cartridges.
The economy mode you mention is one method of reducing the amount of ink used, very similar to draft print settings. It would certainly increase the amount of pages you would get out of a cartridge if printing the same documents as on normal settings. So, for example, if they started to include economy mode printing as a setting in the 5% coverage calculation you would doubtless see the yields of cartridges become higher!
If you need any further tips on how to get more of your cartridges I would recommend our guide on limiting your printing costs here: http://www.stinkyinkshop.co.uk/blog/2010/04/13/saving-money-on-your-printing-costs/
Very useful and interestng to find out out all this works, not suprising it double what is quoted typical manufactures!
cheers
Adi
[...] [...]
Really usefull and as most people will be saying “AAHHH! THAT explains it”. As some one just a few weeks younger than Keith, can I assume the following? When I go to buy a printer, provided the manufacturer is using the ISO/IEC 19798:2007 sheet, this should allow me to get a fairly accurate cost of printing to compare different machines in that manufacturers range and between manufacturers. All be it, using “genuine” inks and probably at full list price.
Regards,
Andrew Lothian.
interesting article.. although would be alot more interesting if the photos actually worked!!!
could you reupload please?
If a standard sheet of five percent is in the region of half a page of normal sized text, why call it 5% instead of 50% page of normalsized text? This is why it is confusing. They should call it 50% of page at normal sized text of Calibri font at 11 size letter.
[...] is based on an industry standard, and does not reflect a typical users printing. Read our guide to what 5% page coverage means to understand why your actual yield may differ to what is [...]
Just read this helpful article after finding that my laser cartridge which promised 7,200 pages at 5% ran out after printing just over 3,000 pages on my mostly text based church magazine. One problem that I had was not understanding what a page with 5% coverage looked like. So I got hold of the AVPSoft program mentioned above and ran it against the pages in my magazine. Pages from this magazine have an average 11.2% coverage per page which came as a shock but explains the low cartridge yield in terms of pages. Each page has line borders so I did a test removing these and reduced the average coverage to 7.6% which was a big improvement. I still only had one page with roughly 5% coverage (4.67%) and this seemed fairly lightly populated by text and some b/w line drawings. This together with the above which shows that half a page of standard text represents 5% coverage would suggest that the ISO standard is slightly misleading to the average consumer because we don’t appreciate what a page looks like with only 5% coverage nor do we understand the ISO standard. The average consumer who buys a cartridge promising 7,200 pages expects to get more than the 3,000 I got (say 6,000?). Surely a more honest way of describing cartridge yield for this cartridge would be to quote a yield of 4,500 pages at 8% coverage. The 8% figure seems closer to the average printed page.
Hi Neil,
Thanks for the brilliant comment, and it’s great to hear you’ve used AVPSoft to lower your page coverage (and save money in the process). A drop to 7.6% is a massive difference!
We agree it’s a shame that a chosen figure of 5% is used, which artificially inflates expectations of a cartridge. I doubt they’ll ever change it, but fingers crossed!
[...] is all due to the way this figure is quoted, which is using an industry standard 5% page coverage (the ISO standard for estimating page [...]
@Huw: Great explanation!
We have an application called Printcalc at http://www.printcalc.com, that reports the % CMYK and Spot colour coverage of PDF, EPS and PS files. Hopefully this can help your readers with their calculations.
I would like to know if a person who only seems to print between 4-6 pages a week need to worry about ink conservation?
Anyone who prints would be able to save money by paying attention to what they’re printing and the formatting… but if you print that small an amount the savings will be minimal, so may not be worth the time.