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ISO/IEC 19752 - Cartridge Yield for monochrome laser printers.
The consumables in a printer have a limited life, proportionate to how much ink or toner is used in a page and how many pages are printed.
Cost per page is a very significant point in the value printers offer to users. Printer manufacturers like to point to print quality, speed, ease of use and costs of maintenance as potentially more important and they have a point - for instance the cost of electricity and eplacement ETBs and fusers are significant part of the cost of owning a printer. However users would rather like a plain statement on cost per page and ISO/IEC 19752 is a significant move towards that.
Historically printer manufacturers agreed to measure the life of consumables at 5% cover - roughly equivalent to a piece of correspondence which was what printers were mainly used for in the 1990s.
Although 5% cover sounds a simple objective - generate a page with some text. Printer manufacturers developed their own in house tests, most of which probably were fair. However there was no guarantee of that, for instance 5% cover could be a band of black covering 1/20th of the page - that wouldn't necessarily be a fair test. Printer consumables often last somewhat longer when the machine does one long print job of several thousand pages because there are fewer startup and cleaning revolutions, so that isn't a ealistic test of use in the real world either.
It would also be open to manufacturers to take a printer from the production line and fine tune it for the test - which wouldn't be at all representative of what users might buy. With nothing said about how the figures are arrived at a manufacturer might even claim that the printer was designed to give some level of economy without ever testing it at all.
ISO/IEC 19752 introduced in June 2004 sets out standards that remove some of these wrinkles. For instance:
It requires toner consumption to be tested on three representative printers using three cartridges each. The printers and cartridges are not taken off the production line but bought in the open market from three different sources. Sample size may seem small considering some printers may sell in millions - but some sell in hundreds.
Standards are set for the test environment, temperature and humidity change the electrostatic fields in a printer and affect yield.
The print mode should be the printer's default settings.
The ISO test target is a PDF called the "LSA page"; it has some text, line art, shading and solid fill.
Paper is to be "conditioned" and of medium weight. If the printer goes to an error condition then the ISO procedures set out a flow chart for what is to be done. When a cartridge reaches exhaustion the standard says how many times it can be shaken.
ISO also sets out definitions of terms and an example of the test eport and how to calculate the results.
There are a few problems with the ISO test
The three printers with three cartridges each procedure isn't a great burden to manufacturers, who will expect to sell thousands of printers. The expense is potentially a problem for cartridge emanufacturers wanting to test their cartridges to the standard.
One problem with all ISO documents is that they aren't actually available for free. ISO sells its documents online.
Another problem is that it only applies to monochrome, not to colour printers. ISO has been developing tests for colour printers and appears to be near finalisation at the time of witing (spring 2009). The standard will be 19798 Editors Paul Jeran and David Spencer. "Method for the Determination of Toner Cartridge Yield for Colour Electrophotographic Printer and Multi-Function Devices that contain printer components."
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue
http://www.rechargermag.com/articles/35828/
http://www.hp.com/pageyield/articles/us/en/MonoLaserJetYieldArticle.html