5% page coverage – what does it look like?

5% page coverage – what does it look like?

Whether you’re looking to purchase a new printer or just looking to reduce your printing costs, it’s worth taking into account the capacity of your ink or toner cartridges.

Every printer ink or toner cartridge you buy will have a capacity measured in pages, which is called a page yield.

What do we mean by “page yield” or “capacity”?

A page yield is a guideline of how many pages your cartridge will print. For example the HP Q2612A cartridge has a page yield of 2000 or 2k. This means this toner cartridge will print 2000 pages at 5% coverage of a page.

What does 5% coverage mean and where did it come from?

Well 5% coverage of an A4 page is what the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) has calculated as the average business letter. Assuming you were printing the average business letter coverage of 5%, you would be able to print the 2000 pages.

Here is an example of what the ISO average business letter looks like:

How to get the most out of your cartridge:

Ok so you now know how much toner or inkjet cartridge you get per page and what we mean by 5% coverage, so how do you make sure you get most out of your cartridge?

Well there are lots of different small factors to take into consideration when trying to achieve the ISO average of 5% coverage, and get the most from your cartridge.

Here are my top tips:

• Type of font you use; a simple change in font can give you a higher word count
• Your font size; making your font size smaller can give you a higher word count
• Graphs, images or single lines use a lot of printer ink, ask yourself if you really need to print a picture.
• The width of your page border; using a smaller border would increase the amount of ink you would use per page.

Did you know that switching your font to Calibri would automatically start saving you money?

When comparing a group of popular fonts between sizes 9 to 12, Calibri gave you a higher word count for your 5% coverage than Arial, Comic Sans, Tahoma and Times New Roman.

To Summarise

The page yield of your toner was created as a guide and nothing more, by the ISO as a reseller it’s a standard we must adhere to but remember… to get the most out of your cartridge.

• Change the font you use to Calibri.
• Keep your font sizes to between 9 and 12.
• Ask yourself, do I really need to print this picture?
•  Use a narrower border.