What does 5% page coverage look like? 
Here at Stinkyink we’re regularly asked by our customers how many pages a given cartridge should print, to which the answer is usually to find the information on the cartridge and then tell the person on the other end of the line however many sheets at a five percent yield. After about two months of these conversations, I went to Mister Stinkyink, and asked him just how much five percent of a page is; he shrugged, so I went around the office and asked a few others.
Nobody had an answer for me.
So, my research began. I first discovered that the ISO (the International Organisation for Standardisation) are the people who set this 5% measurement, using a standardised sheet memorably named ISO/IEC 19798:2007. As you can see (left), this is far from being a full sheet, but I thought I’d look into it with a little more detail. 
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 tell you 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 (right). 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. Now, I could have left it at that, and had a rough idea of what it would look like… But I delved a little deeper.
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 when 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, what have I learnt from this? Mostly that even those of us who are in business with ink don’t really know what 5% looks like, but also that turning to a smaller font size and getting rid of borders and excess lines can save you money!
- Huw
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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 =)
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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!