Laser Printers and 5% Converage

[icedart]

Hello,
I have been looking for a laser printer recently and I have noticed that manufacturers life the quantity of pages a cartridge of toner will print with 5% converge. Does this mean that if only full pages are printed, the toner will output 20 times fewer pages? If not, how much coverage is a full page?
Thanks

 

[cjl]

5% coverage is about right if printing near a full page of text (perhaps a bit more than that). To get 100% coverage, you'd basically need to be printing solid black pages.

 

[hang-the-9]

+1^, you misunderstood what they mean by "5% coverage". That does not mean you are only printing on 5% of the page. It's the coverage of the ink compared to the page size. Basically if you take all the printed text and compress it like a ball of putty together, that ball will be 5% of the total paper size.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

you also need to take into account other consumables a printer might have such as drum units, waste toner cartridges, transfer belts etc. Best idea is to get a hp or canon as everything is usually in the one cartridge so you replace the drum, developer and toner at the same time. This also means if you have any print quality issues just change the cartridge as anything that can affect image quality is contained in that unit. Their colour units often have a separate transfer belt but that should last ages.