Why your business should understand printer cartridge yield

Businesses across the globe are constantly searching for ways to cut operating costs and make day-to-day administration cheaper.

By trimming excess expenditure and controlling costs, corporations can not only increase their profit margin; they can distribute any savings to other areas of the business in order to drive their enterprise forward more effectively. One cost-saving exercise could be looking at your printer cartridge yield.

That’s why, it’s vital business leaders exploit any areas in which administrative savings can be made – however trifling the subsequent saving may be. With this in mind, we’re here to tell you about printer cartridge yields and why your business should understand them.

What is print cartridge yield?

In short, printer cartridge yield is the amount of pages a given cartridge is capable of producing until it has ran out of ink or toner; it is the number you’ll see on the side of the cartridge’s packaging, and is intended to give consumers an approximate guide as to how many prints they can expect from a specific cartridge.

In the past, printer cartridge yield was calculated by individual printer manufacturers, or OEMs (original equipment manufacturer) as they’re often known. Each OEM used different methods to calculate cartridge yield, making it difficult for consumers to ascertain which was the optimal product. Therefore, an ISO (International Organisation for Standardization) document was created – allowing manufacturers to calculate cartridge yield using a fair, unbiased method.

In this informative – albeit, lengthy – guide to understanding print cartridge page yields, Lexmark liken cartridge yield to the expected MPG (miles per gallon) of a car; stating that the advertised yield will differ greatly depending on the printer usage – much like the MPG of a car will vary depending on how it is driven.

For instance, if you print mostly black text documents, you’ll achieve a greater yield per page than if you regularly print large, full-colour images. Typically, the optimum printer cartridge yield as acknowledged by the ISO is 5% – meaning that 5% of the page is covered by ink or toner.

How can it help your business save?

Once you understand printer cartridge page yield, it’s possible to implement certain practices into a broader printer management strategy to help reduce on-going print costs. Printer cartridge specialists, Printhead, explain the benefits of improved page yield further: “By taking steps to improve the page yield of an office printer, businesses can achieve more prints per cartridge, subsequently saving money on the cost of replacing cartridges. Higher page yields are good news for the environment too, as they ensure companies can print with minimal wastage.”

Tips on improving page yield in the workplace

For companies interested in shaving pounds off their annual print bill, there are a number of ways to improve page yield and achieve more prints per cartridge from your business printing machine.

Reduce coverage

Essentially, reducing the surface coverage of a page means printing less large, ink or toner heavy images and solely printing black text documents. Whilst text documents have total coverage of around 5%, images can take up anything from 10% to 100% of the total page coverage – meaning low, inefficient page yields.

Change your corporate typeface

As reported by The Guardian, varying font styles can affect the amount companies spend on printing by a remarkable amount – with one university in the US reporting a 30% drop in ink usage simply by switching to a more economical font style. As some fonts are larger and thicker than others, switching fonts will help to improve page yield – thus improving your overall cost per sheet.

Consider print job size

In an office environment, it’s likely to print jobs will be submitted sporadically within minutes or hours of each other. If possible, consider grouping print jobs together to ensure no toner or ink is wasted during the printer’s warm-up process. Not only will this improve overall page yield, but it’ll also reduce the number of print jobs sent to the printer by error – meaning less wastage and more money saved by the business.