A standard black ink cartridge prints roughly 200 to 300 pages, and an XL version roughly 600 to 800 pages. Both figures assume 5% page coverage, the lab standard for a plain text page, and your real result depends on what you actually print.

The top-ranking guides give the same ranges, but they leave three gaps. First, they rarely turn page yield into cost per page. Second, they seldom compare standard and XL cartridges over a full year of printing. Third, they rarely quantify what heavier coverage does to the yield. This guide closes all three.

Page yield is measured under the ISO/IEC 24711 standard for inkjet printers, using test pages with 5% ink coverage. That is roughly a short text email or memo. A page of dense text, bold headings, or colour graphics can easily reach 10% or 20% coverage, using two to four times the ink per page, which is why real yields often fall short of the box number.

Worked example — cost per page. Take a standard cartridge priced at $32 with a 300-page yield. The cost per page is 32 / 300 = 0.107 dollars, or 10.7 cents per page. Take an XL cartridge priced at $48 with a 650-page yield. Its cost per page is 48 / 650 = 0.074 dollars, or 7.4 cents per page. The XL cartridge costs more at the checkout but about 3.3 cents less on every page.

Worked example — one year of printing. Suppose a household prints 40 pages a week, which is 40 x 52 = 2,080 pages a year. With standard cartridges, that needs 2,080 / 300 = 6.93, rounded up to 7 cartridges, costing 7 x 32 = $224 a year. With XL cartridges, it needs 2,080 / 650 = 3.2, rounded up to 4 cartridges, costing 4 x 48 = $192 a year. The XL route saves $224 - $192 = $32 a year at this volume, and the saving grows with heavier printing.

Worked example — heavier coverage. If your pages average 10% coverage instead of the lab standard 5%, each page uses roughly twice the ink, so a 300-page cartridge yields roughly 150 pages. The same logic applies to photos, which can use far more ink per page than text. If you print mostly photos, judge cartridges by photo yield or by cost per page at your coverage, not by the headline number.

Three ways to stretch a cartridge. Print in draft or economy mode for everyday documents, which lays down less ink. Print in black and white when colour is not needed, so the colour cartridge is not drained by mixed documents. Print regularly, because an idle inkjet can use ink on cleaning cycles, and a cartridge left unused for weeks can dry out. None of these change the box yield, but all of them change your real yield.

Bottom line: read the box yield as a 5% coverage figure, divide price by yield for your true cost per page, and compare cartridges over a year of your actual volume. At 2,080 pages a year, XL cartridges cost $192 against $224 for standard ones in the example above.

Q: What does 5% page coverage mean?

A: It is the lab standard for measuring page yield, roughly a short text page with ink on 5% of its area. Heavier pages use more ink and yield fewer pages.

Q: How do I calculate cost per page?

A: Divide the cartridge price by its page yield. A $32 cartridge yielding 300 pages costs 10.7 cents per page, and a $48 XL cartridge yielding 650 pages costs 7.4 cents per page.

Q: Are XL cartridges actually cheaper?

A: Usually yes per page, despite the higher checkout price. At 2,080 pages a year, the example here gives $192 for XL against $224 for standard cartridges.

Q: Why does my cartridge run out far below its rated pages?

A: Most often because your pages carry more than 5% coverage, such as dense text, graphics, or photos, or because cleaning cycles used ink while the printer sat idle.