There are a couple of ways to go about comparing printer models when you’re shopping for office equipment. You can look at their baseline price or you can investigate the resources they need to operate and calculate the overall cost per page. Printer repair experts near me recommend the latter strategy. Cost per page considers the amount of ink needed for a specific model and how those cartridges will add up over time. It also considers page yield and page coverage. Before you reach for the first printer model on the shelf, read more about these printer terms.
Page Yield
If you’ve ever dealt with a printer that runs out of ink fast, then you may have picked a model with a low page yield. According to printer and copier repair technicians near me, page yield or duty cycle describes the maximum amount of pages that you can print with one toner or ink cartridge. Calculating this number can be difficult because not all pages will use the same amount of ink. However, the product description of the ink should detail more information that gives the consumer a better idea of the measurement.
Page Coverage
When page yield isn’t enough to describe a printer’s efficiency, you can also look into the page coverage for the specific ink that it requires. The industry-standard test for ink page yield is five percent coverage. If you’re wondering what this looks like, then you should imagine about six lines of text (in 12-point font). If six lines are five percent coverage, then a full page would be around fifteen to twenty percent coverage. Page coverage can thus affect the total page yield. Typically, office printers will use more than five percent page coverage, which means that the total page yield will be lower.
Other Factors
Page coverage is certainly one of the most important factors for measuring page yield. However, it is not the only one. According to printer repair experts near me, here are some of the other elements that can impact the page yield of a printer:
- How often a printer is serviced
- The quality of printer parts
- The humidity of the environment
- The age of the printer
- The frequency of print jobs
How to Make Ink Last Longer
If you don’t want to worry about printing at five percent coverage, then you may want to look into other ways to save on ink. Here are some of our best recommendations for making your ink last longer:
Save Documents Online
There’s no reason to print every version of a draft. Save and edit your documents online before you print out a copy. You can keep files on hard drives, cloud storage, or saved on computers.
Adjust Printing Habits
All of us can fall into bad printer habits which wear out our equipment and cause us to spend more on printer supplies. The best way to change that is to be aware of it. Make sure to proofread documents and check your printer settings before clicking that print button.
Set Printer to Draft Mode
Did you know that some printers have a draft mode that uses less ink? This is perfect for the times when you want to test out a document, but you know that it won’t be the final copy. Try draft mode when you need a physical copy, but you don’t need it to be pretty.
Change Your Font
You can actually save ink by changing your font! Some fonts take up more page room and, thus, more page coverage. When you use a smaller font, then you ultimately minimize your total amount of page coverage used when printing.
Buy a New Printer
Let’s face it, printers don’t last forever. If you’ve been using the same printer for over 7 years, then it may be time for an upgrade. Older models are more expensive to maintain. Get a new model that will provide the page yield you need without breaking your budget!
