Fullness

A full ink cartridge has a volume of ink in it. The volume in ink cartridges is measured in milliliters (ML) which is the same thing as cubic centimeters (CC). As a conversion, 5 ML = 1 Teaspoon. The cartridge here has 19 ML in it from the factory. That works out to almost 4 teaspoons of ink.

Unfortunately, those 4 teaspoons of ink are divided between three colors. So, you get 1.3 teaspoons of each color. If you are thinking this is not very much, you are correct. Remember this when you are deciding to print a picture of a green lawn scape. It will use your blue and yellow (blue + yellow make green) ink in great volumes.

When considering any printer purchase it is important to first understand what on-going costs will be. To do this learn what cartridges the printer/copier/fax uses and research how much ink they hold vs the cost to purchase them. Some ink cartridges and all toner cartridges are also rated in page yield - how many pages the unit will produce before exhaustion. This is a industry standard rating system but the standard is flawed.

You may find that a given cartridge will produce 1000 pages. But this rating is based on 5% or less coverage per page. This means using a standard 10 point font double spaced with no bolding, borders, graphics or other elements. The 1000 pages are very unlikely to be realized in normal use. But the yield ratings are comparable so if you see a 1000 page rating from one manufacturer's cartridge and 2000 from another, the 2000 page unit will produce about twice the copy as the 1000 page unit. As a rule of thumb consider page yields to be half or less of the rated page number.

Toner cartridges use an "ink" called toner. It is actually a fine powder or wax that is heat sensitive. Page rating works the same way for toner cartridges but in most cases you will find that toner cartridges have much higher yield page ratings. Generally they are set up to deliver more copies per cartridge than ink cartridges. There are some high volume ink printing systems but they are typically expensive professional units.

One more thing. Printing full page graphics or photos uses a tremendous amount of ink or toner. Tests have been conducted where a mixture of photographs were printed on a monochrome (black and white only) laser printer that used a 1500 page rated cartridge. The cartridge was totally exhausted after 40 full page photos. this should give you an idea of why percentage of page coverage is a critical metric in determining how much printing a given cartridge will produce.