*NEWS*INK YIELDS–AN INCONVENIENT THRUTH

Toner News Mobile Forums Latest Industry News *NEWS*INK YIELDS–AN INCONVENIENT THRUTH

Date: Tuesday February 20, 2007 11:04:00 am
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  • Anonymous
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    Printer yields – an inconvenient truth
    Standards
    for comparing page yields are often sidelined, lest they reveal the
    scale of vendors’ fibsYou may have heard of the cliché about there
    being lies, damned lies, and printer page yield figures. It is bad
    enough that cartridges for inkjets are ludicrously overpriced, but to
    compound these sins, manufacturers’ quoted page yields for these
    rip-off cartridge refills are simply outrageous.So it ought to be good
    news that HP, Canon and Kodak have announced their support for ISO/IEC
    24711:2006, a standard method for calculating how many pages can be
    produced from an inkjet cartridge.Call me dour but I’m unimpressed. In
    terms of industry significance, it comes down to a generally worded
    message of support – not one of adoption – by two of the biggest
    printer manufacturers: HP and Canon.The inkjet market is bigger than
    just these two, however, and the rest of the pack are not exactly
    running through a field of daffodils to embrace standard number
    24711.Having a universal standard for calculating inkjet page yield
    provides a level playing field for all manufacturers. So why are only
    two of them voicing their support? Well, it’s obvious: the page yield
    figures quoted by much of the industry have been falsified to flatter
    their products. We’re not talking little fibs here, but premier league
    porkies. I have been testing printers for over 15 years and have come
    to the conclusion that vendor ink cartridge yields are calculated by
    counting the number of pages you can print and then multiplying the
    result by some random number.
    Any adoption of a fair standard is
    likely to see manufacturers’ quoted figures plummet, and no one wants
    to be first to downgrade their already published
    specifications.Besides, we’ve been here before. A few years ago, HP was
    one of the companies expounding another standard known as ISO/IEC
    19752:2004 that provides a method for calculating the page yield of
    mono laser printer toner cartridges. A quick check of the
    specifications for laser printers on the market today reveals that only
    Kyocera publicly lists this standard as the basis for its toner page
    yield projections. If HP and others are using this standard – and I
    would like to believe that HP is – they are being very coy about
    it.This is unfortunate, because if buyers don’t know whether or not a
    manufacturer is using a specific standard testing method for
    calculating their toner or ink yields, then you can’t compare like for
    like, and the whole effort of having a standard is worthless. The cynic
    in me wonders whether this is not the intention: by not quoting the
    standard, you effectively devalue it, and soon enough buyers will have
    forgotten about it.Printer consumable costs won’t break your
    organisation but they often account for a non-trivial portion of
    workgroup budgets. So terrorise your suppliers by asking for cartridge
    yield quotations based on these ISO standards. And remind them of
    ISO/IEC 19798:2006, the page yield calculation standard for toner in
    colour lasers.

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