One of the important aspects to think of when choosing a printer or buying a replacement cartridge, is how much ink or toner that cartridge actually contains. Amount of ink or toner in cartridge is usually called cartridge yield or page yield.

When you turn to see what the yield of a cartridge is, you will see a number of pages the cartridge is enough to print.

But printed pages differ from one another. One time you print a to-do list, next time it’s 10-page report.

For the purpose of cartridge yield measure, almost all printer manufacturers base their black ink/toner cartridge yields on 5% coverage. This means only 5% of the whole page is covered with ink or toner. 5% coverage implies basic type with no bold characters, no graphics and no pictures.

CMYK toners for colour laser printers and copiers base their cartridges yields on 20% to 35% coverage (5% to 7% per colour). In reality, if a document had a 100% fill, there would be 400% coverage. Tri-colour inkjet/toner cartridges base their page yield on 15% coverage (5% per colour).

Now take the last two paragraphs above and place them on a Letter-sized sheet of paper. Congratulations! You have created a sample 5% coverage page: