What Does 'Page Coverage' Mean?

It’s a phrase you’ll see quite a lot on the City Ink Express website – ‘page coverage’ is a crucial consideration when you’re trying to figure out how long an ink or toner cartridge will last. But what exactly is page coverage?

That’s the question we’re aiming to answer today. Put simply, ‘page coverage’ refers to the percentage of a page that is covered in ink. 5% is the industry standard; in case you’re curious, 5% page coverage looks something like this:

It’s a pretty sparse document, but that (roughly speaking) is what we in the printing industry use as a standard for calculating page yield. If you’re looking at a new toner cartridge on the City Ink website and it says ‘Page Yield: 2,5000 pages @ 5% coverage’, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get 2,500 pages out of it. That only applies if every page you print looks like the example above – in reality, you’ll most likely be printing far more densely-populated documents, so bear that in mind when you’re shopping for ink or toner.