When purchasing toner for your iColor or Oki white toner printer the wording that comes along with the purchase will mention how many pages you will get out of the toner. This document will hopefully clear up any confusion or frustration that might come along with expectations on how long the toner will last.
Please understand that it is impossible to determine exactly how many pages you will get out of your toner. Each image will use up a different amount of toner to reproduce the image onto your selected paper. With the different options that you have with rasterization and color knockouts this complicates the estimation even more. But the more toner that can be removed from the image the more pages you will get out of each toner.
- For this example, we will be using the iColor 550 Extended Yield rated at 7,000 pages.
The 7,000 page extend yield is based off a page size of 8.5x11 (Letter Size) with a 5% coverage. 5% coverage is basically what you are reading here. Text on a page is going to get you close to 7,000 pages.
With that being said, most images that you will print will be greater than a 5% coverage. An adjustment will be needed based off your coverage percentage of your print.
- 10% coverage will get you 3,500 pages
- 20% coverage will get you 1,750 pages
- 40% coverage will get you 875 pages
- 80% coverage will get you 437 pages
Most people are printing between 40%-80% coverage on Letter or A4 size paper on their iColor 550 printers. The 7,000 pages can be misleading, but unfortunately, this is an industry standard practice with toner cartridges. With a little math and understanding of your printed images, you can get an idea of how many prints you are getting out of your toner cartridges.