Page yield is the metric that manufacturers use to state how many pages on average a given cartridge will print before the cartridge runs out of ink. The page yield of a cartridge can be found on the manufacturer’s documentation on their website or a retailer’s website. Sometimes, it can be found on the or within the cartridge package.
Most cartridge manufacturers use an assumption that the printed characters on a standard page will cover 5% of the total page area to calculate the page yield. This assumption might not be valid depending on the type of printing you are doing. If you print a lot of pictures full page, then the number of pages that you print will be significantly less than the page yield stated by the printer manufacturer.
Page yield is directly proportional to the amount of ink stored within a cartridge. This is the reason why standard yield cartridges have a lesser number for page yield compared to a high yield cartridge. For some particular cartridge types, the high yield cartridge might print as much as two times the number of pages as the standard yield type.
There are financial impacts of the page yield of a cartridge. First, the page yield lets you plan how many paper sheets you will need for a given cartridge type. Secondly, it gives an estimate of how frequently you will need to replace your cartridge with the knowledge of how many pages you expect to print within a given time frame.
