Customers often worry about the yield of pages their cartridges give and will mistakenly try to track a cartridge’s yield by time. The amount of time it takes for a cartridge to go empty is an inaccurate indicator of its page yield. The manufacturer’s stated page yield for ink and toner cartridges is given at 5% coverage. This means that the quoted page yield is based upon printed pages where only 5% of the page has been imprinted with ink. This comes out to be a small amount of imprinted ink – roughly one quarter of the page. For example, a short memo has approximately 5% coverage. If you are printing letters, using legal size paper, printing photos, web pages or any type of graphics, your coverage will vary greatly and your page yield will drop much more significantly.There are two ways to correctly check for yield. First is to utilize any page count your printer has. Please see the user's manual for instructions. The other way is to count reams or boxes of paper you have used with each cartridge. Both of these methods will tell you how many pages per cartridge you are using.Please keep in mind that although both methods give you with an approximation, your cartridge’s yield will ultimately depend on your printing proceedures. You should also take into consideration the typical print coverage on the pages that you are creating. For example, if you only print short memos you will reach – or, come close to – the manufacturer’s state page yield. In contrast, if you write full page letters or print graphics, your page yield will be significantly less. A cartridge with a 4000 page yield, for example, will run out of ink or toner at around 800 pages when used to print full pages of text and graphics with a high percentage of ink or toner coverage.