Page Yield The Real Cost Of Printing, Find Out Why.Page yield is the number of pages that you'll get out of a inkjet or toner cartridge. The yield of a cartridge is a very important factor you should consider when purchasing a printer. Look at the cartridge information to see what page yield they will provide. Many manufacturers are now promoting that they offer lower priced cartridges to save you money, Is that the real reason? Printer cartridge manufacturers understand their brand name cartridges are expensive and they are trying to win the consumer over by offering these lower priced printer ink cartridges. Sometimes consumers will buy because of the lower price, it seems like such a relief from paying $30-45 for a black or tri-color cartridge. What good is it if the lower priced cartridge also puts out a significant lower page yield, is it still a bargain? NO! Printer cartridge manufacturers use general terms like standard yield or high yield to describe their cartridges. Each printer model's cartridge should give you the printer ink usage which is the number of pages it can print under standard conditions. That would give us, an estimate of the cost per page for that cartridge which is the Real Cost of Printing. Any inkjet or toner cartridge that provides a high yield version will always save you money. Simply compare the price and page yield of the standard and high yield cartridges and you'll see.
OK lets look at an example of some HP page yields starting with an inkjet cartridge, standard yield verses high yield. The HP 74 CB335WN for instance. It has a retail value of approximately $15, and that cartridge will yield 200 pages at 5% coverage. The high yield version is the HP 74XL CB336WN , retails for approximately $35 and that cartridge will yield 750 pages at 5% coverage. If over time you purchased 3 of the standard yield HP 74 inkjet cartridges it would cost you $45, but only give you a total page yield of 600 for the 3 cartridges. See how your better off with the higher yield version when it's available. You'd save $10 by choosing the High yield HP74XL cartridge and be able to print 150 pages more. It pays to do a little homework.
What about toner, sometimes you'd have to buy 2.5 standard yield toner cartridges to equal one high yield cartridge. Take a look at this example.
The HP laserjet 1320 uses the Q5949A
toner cartridge (standard yield cartridge) which provides a yield of 2,500 pages at 5% coverage. The average cost is around $80.
Another very important point is that most cartridge manufacturers indicate that the number of pages a cartridge will yield is at 5% coverage.What does that really mean?Lets look at the same HP 74 inkjet we discussed earlier. Cost was around $15 giving us a 200 pages at 5% coverage. With the cost of ink these days this looks like a real bargain doesn't it? That is not a lot of print on a page. A short memo would be about 5% coverage. Think about that for a moment. Lets be realistic about this, most of us are printing reports, typing letters, copying emails, printing pictures, the list is endless. The point being, with such a variety of printing jobs most will be more than 5% coverage.So as an example a one page printed letter will be around 40-50% coverage on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. That will no doubt drop your inkjet page yield down quite a bit, then how much will it cost you per page, lets see. Take $15 divided by the 200 page yield that = .08 cents per copy. If your thinking that's not too bad don't forget that was at 5% coverage remember, now the price of that cartridge, or your cost per page jumps way up.If your printing pictures, graphics etc. it will cost you even more. So lets be very generous to make the point. Lets say we print a one page report with no graphics, pictures etc. and now that 200 page yield drops to around 80. Lets now look at the cost per page.$15 divided by 80 = .19 cents per page. That lower priced cartridge doesn't seem so cheap anymore does it? Using the numbers with our toner cartridge example will produce the same effect, a lower page yield costing you more money. The fact of the matter is any cartridge, inkjet or toner that has a specific number of pages it states that can be printed from that cartridge is NOT the true page yield Keep in mind that there are other factors that can increase or decrease your toner or inkjet page yield when buying a printer, the price, quality of print, the type of printer, inkjet or laser, the printers reliability, warranty etc. Don't forget you can buy some cartridges in twin packs or dual packs that will help bring down your costs as well. An added note: if you mainly print black, and print volume a laser printer is a better bargain.It will average a considerable lower cost per page. One last suggestion I'd like to make to you is that you can bring your cost per page down even further and that's with the use of a Quality Remanufactured Toner or InkJet Cartridge. (WAIT, if you ever had a bad experience with a remanufactured cartridge it was probably because of a quality issue. I've been in this industry for over 10 years and can tell you first hand that there are very poor quality cartridges sold no doubt, this is what hurts the cartridge remanufacturing industry.) There are a number companies that are very aware of what is available on in the market and choose to sell only Quality remanufactured products to their customers. One reason is they want their customers to buy from them again and again winning their trust. I've put together some
important keys points
for you to consider when purchasing your printer ink online or offline and my Recommendations of some of those top companies that will sell Quality remanufactured products. You could save around 30-50% off the price of a new brand name cartridge which makes the real cost of all your printing even less.
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