How can I measure toner coverage?

August 13, 2008 3:24 PM

How can I measure ink coverage? I know my toner will yield 3,000 pages at 5% coverage, but I want to know what coverage is typical for the pages I print. (Found PC product, seeking Mac or web-based software)

I'd like to be able to learn the toner coverage of a given page before I print it in order to better measure my home printing costs. My search turned up APFill for PC, but I'd like a Mac or web-based product. I'm looking for something simple and cheap.

posted by reeddavid to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Where I work, 6% coverage is said to be a full page of single-spaced 12 pt. text. Not sure if that helps.
posted by seldomfun at 3:37 PM on August 13, 2008

You could use Preview to save the page as an image file, resize it to a single pixel, and measure the resulting color. According to that method, a full page (edge-to-edge) of text from Wikipedia was 21/255 black (8.23%).

I tried getting an accurate number by printing to a huge bitmap image and counting the black pixels with Perl -- the result was 8.3%, so the first method seems to be accurate enough.
posted by you at 4:13 PM on August 13, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Some printers remember the average historical coverage. Print a status sheet and see if it's on there.

Being extra super precise isn't going to net you anything; those yield numbers are just guidelines. Toner is filled by weight. A gram of toner amounts to a lot of pages. So if they are off by a tenth here and there, your predicted yields will be off.

(Even worse are the refilled/"recycled" cartridges. Quality control is not nearly as good, and they rarely empty the waste toner receptacle. When they fill it up, that waste toner counts toward fill weight.)

The best way to reduce toner usage is to use draft/economode whenever possible. Yes, it's dull looking. But it saves a tremendous amount of ink.
posted by gjc at 6:04 PM on August 13, 2008

I use to manage a store that sold printers and the official standard used by HP, Canon, Epsom in consumer models to measure yields is 5% page coverage = one average paragraph with 1 1/2" borders. I have found in my previous experience as a student, one essay page was about 15% coverage double spaced.
posted by saradarlin at 10:31 PM on August 14, 2008