Toner coverage explained
Firstly why home printers cost businesses the earth in cartridges!
We often get enquiries from businesses who have purchased home use / small printers for the office. One of the complaints we hear is that the cartridges run out of ink/toner really quickly and the replacements typically cost more than the printer itself.
Starter Cartridges Explained
Firstly, when you buy a new printer, it will come with starter cartridges which are typically 50% less than a replacement cartridge would last. These starter cartridges are just enough to get the machine going and produce a few prints.
Cartridge Yields Explained
When you then buy a replacement cartridge, the manufacturer will quote a yield. The yield could be say 1,000 prints. This is where people get confused. The ISO standard for a cartridge yield based on 5% coverage.
But what is coverage?
In basic talk, if you get an A4 sheet of paper and consider when the whole sheet is printed on this would be 100% coverage. Then fold it in half and this would be 50% coverage. Fold it once more and it’s 25%, another fold and it’s 12.5%, and one more you’ve got just over 6%. It’s now a very small piece of paper.
In cartridge terms, the quoted yield of say 1,000 prints is based on an A4 page being covered with no more than 6% of ink/toner or the size of the folded piece of paper!
How is a managed print service (MPS) different?
As before we explained the 5% coverage ISO standard, this doesn’t apply with a Managed Print Service (MPS). You’ll get a fixed price per A4 print whether it’s a full page of print or a percentage of the page.
For example, print a A4 colour print with 100% coverage on a MPS device it will be 5p. If print it on a device where you buy the cartridges, as above. To cover 100% of the page, it will be around 16x those 6% page coverages. Which at 5p each would work out around 80p per print. That’s a 94% saving for every print!
Extrapolate this to 1,000 prints and you would save £750.00!
What else is included with MPS?
With a MPS agreement all you have to do is put paper in the machine! Everything else is provided by us.
Want to know more? Then give us a call 01376 512575.