Page Coverage Printing Statistics

[me]

I don't know whether anyone is interested but it might make a useful
comparison against manufacturers 5% page coverage estimates.

Anyway, I have a solid ink Xerox machine which in two and a bit years
has printed about 62000 pages. About half the output was black only and
the other half was colour. Most of the colour pages consisted of text
with three or five 3.7-4" wide photographs interspersed, and probably
about 1-2000 would have been a half page photo with two smaller photos
beneath and a little bit of text, a similar number would have been
essentially a page of photographs.

After all that usage the average page coverage according to the
printer's stats printout was
Cyan: 2% Magenta: 3% Yellow: 2% Black: 7%

 

[trevor]

I don't know whether anyone is interested but it might make a useful
comparison against manufacturers 5% page coverage estimates.

Anyway, I have a solid ink Xerox machine which in two and a bit years
has printed about 62000 pages. About half the output was black only and
the other half was colour. Most of the colour pages consisted of text
with three or five 3.7-4" wide photographs interspersed, and probably
about 1-2000 would have been a half page photo with two smaller photos
beneath and a little bit of text, a similar number would have been
essentially a page of photographs.

After all that usage the average page coverage according to the
printer's stats printout was
Cyan: 2% Magenta: 3% Yellow: 2% Black: 7%

Hi there! You have a great idea, but the 5% "standard" isn't uniform across
manufacturers. Some include margins (up to 1.5"), some discount dot spread,
some use heavy paper, some use light.

So the only real way to test is to run the same test on every machine in a
more controlled environment. But from this we can produce accurate
cost-per-page analysis.

Which we did a few years ago. Now the information is out of date so the
powers that be won't let me show it to you. It takes a LOT of work to set
up the entire test platform for a run like that, so it's one of those
things we always want to do and some day will find time for.

thINK4inc.com

 

[Arthur Entlich]

The information is interesting, but has to be well considered to
understand. You state that half the output was black only. That means
that already, the color numbers need to be doubled to represent the
pages that had some color on them. That means 31,000 had some color text
and images. Even using your higher number, of those color ones, only
about 6-7% had 2/3rd photographic coverage. The others sound like they
were mainly text a with a couple of small images. Of course, an image
can contain very different amounts of color coverage, as well.

I don't know how much black was on the sheets that also had color text
and images.

Just doing a very coarse set of calculations, I expect the ink usage was
about 5-7% per color, which isn't bad, if it is accurate. However, solid
ink machines probably are some of the most economical in terms of waste
ink if they are left on standby/sleep mode.

Still, interesting.

A better question is how much did it cost in ink to do all that printing
(were you using the free black ink deal from Xerox??)

Art

 

[me]

A better question is how much did it cost in ink to do all that
printing (were you using the free black ink deal from Xerox??)

No, as its an 8200 as opposed to the previous models that had the free
ink. I'm in the other office now and don't have the pages to hand, but
it did tell me the number of ink blocks used, down to about 5 decimal
places. IIRC it was about 22 blocks of blue and about 30 of the yellow
and magenta. For the first year and a bit I was paying about 10 pounds
a block, but lately I've been getting discarded ones for 6-7 pounds a
go.

 

[Arthur Entlich]

Thanks for the additional information.

Forgetting about black for a minute, your ink usage is about 84 blocks
of solid ink, at about 840 pounds cost, which was about 2 x Canadian, so
that would be about $1600 CAN.

If I did the math correctly, that's about $.20 per page for color (not
including black ink) at about average 6-8% per color coverage. Not as
inexpensive as I was expecting.

Art