Learning How To Calculate Printing Costs Per Page

2010-01-14

If you do a lot of printing, it is important to know how to calculate the cost per page of your printer cartridges. Whether you have an ink printer using ink cartridges or a laser printer using laser toner, the calculations are not that difficult to learn and may save you a couple hundred dollars over the course of a year if you make the right choices. Also, there are several things you can do to maximize the number of pages your printer will print on one ink cartridge, which will also decrease your overall printer ink costs.

Before you buy a new printer, find out which printer ink cartridges are compatible with the printer. You might check the manufacturer's website. Sometimes, they will list an estimated annual printer ink cost based on a set number of printed pages per year and a certain percentage of the page covered in ink. For example, if you print mostly text, you will get more pages. However, if you tend to print a lot of graphics, you will get fewer pages. Before you buy the ink cartridge, be sure to shop around for the combination of the best price and best rated customer service.

The easiest way to calculate the printing cost per page is to divide the cost of the printer ink by the number of pages for which the printer ink cartridge is rated. You can usually find this information on the packaging. For example, let's say you buy an ink cartridge that costs $10 and is rated for 1,000 pages. That would mean the cartridge had a printing cost per page of $10 divided by 1,000 pages, or $0.01.

In order to get an accurate cost per page, you have to add up the total cost of all the ink cartridges that the printer requires. If you are using a black and white printer, you will probably only need to use the cost of the black ink cartridge. However, if you need to calculate the cost per page of a color printer, you will need to add the costs of all the ink cartridges. Usually, this will include cyan, magenta and yellow, in addition to the black one. Color printers usually use all the ink cartridges when printing. If we use our example from above, we can say each cartridge costs $10. The total page count would still only be 1,000 pages. In this case you would divide $40 (the cost of all four cartridges added together) by 1,000 pages. This would yield a cost per page of $0.04.

By doing the math, you can get a better idea on how to save on your own printing costs.