| Perhaps one of the most important questions and | | | | statements and other black and white word |
| one of the most frequent questions asked in the | | | | documents that are predominantly text based, |
| world today relates to ink cartridges and the | | | | then they are going to find that on average each |
| capacity that they have. People want to know for | | | | of their cartridges will last longer than the |
| reasons related to toner refill products and | | | | cartridges used by a person that regularly prints |
| replacement cartridge purchases how many | | | | photographs, color drawings and a number of |
| pages their ink cartridge will print. While this is | | | | other things that tend to cover a piece of paper |
| certainly a question that is worth discussing, | | | | in far greater measure than simple text |
| unfortunately there is no real answer when it | | | | documents do. |
| comes to putting down an exact number on | | | | Printer companies from HP to many others used |
| paper as to the capacity of a specific printer | | | | to give estimations as to the number of pages |
| cartridge. | | | | that could be yielded from a single cartridge and |
| Why is there no answer? Well, this is primarily | | | | doubtless you have heard the phrase this |
| because the different manufacturers have | | | | estimate is based on 5% coverage. Well, the |
| different ink levels in different cartridges. Taking | | | | unfortunate truth is that even text documents |
| an average value of pages that were printed by | | | | cover more than 5% of a page, making those |
| the different cartridges would be a useless | | | | estimates useless. Also, ink cartridges used to |
| average because it would be possible for there to | | | | have quite a bit more ink in them (consider that |
| be a huge deviation from the average value for a | | | | the HP 45 has 42 ml of ink and the HP 96 has 21 |
| number of different cartridges. For example, if | | | | ml of ink) which is another reason why the older |
| ten cartridges printed a thousand pages each and | | | | estimates are unreliable today. |
| ten printed a hundred pages each, the average | | | | So why did companies stop giving out estimates |
| amount would be 550 pages per cartridge; a value | | | | of the capacities of their ink cartridges? Well, with |
| that corresponds to none of the cartridges that | | | | the advent of the internet and the subsequent |
| were looked at. | | | | ease of sharing of information, it was widely |
| In addition to the capacities and construction | | | | publicized that a lot of the estimates were just |
| values of the actual cartridge manufacturers, | | | | plain wrong when held up to empirical information |
| there is also the small matter of what the printer | | | | and therefore to avoid potential lawsuit problems, |
| ink cartridge is actually used for. People that use | | | | ink creation companies have simply just stopped |
| their printers to just print things like essays, thesis | | | | giving those types of estimates out. |