Toner News Mobile › Forums › Latest Industry News › *NEWS*INK YIELDS–AN INCONVENIENT THRUTH
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AnonymousInactivePrinter 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. -
AuthorFebruary 20, 2007 at 11:04 AM
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