How many pages of colour can a HP Printer print?

Posted by Felix Okoli on Friday November 21, 2014 at 12:55:19:

I recently got a new printer that I'm using and coincidentally, a few days ago, a friend also requested that I help him print about 500 pages of colour. Well, I don't plan on doing that for free given that 500 pages of colour is most probably going to finish off my printing ink which is considerable given the rising price of printing ink in our world today. Besides, the price of printing a coloured page at commercial computer centers in Nigeria is about N200($1.13) per page. I might however offer him a discount as a friend but he also has to make some sacrifices.

I've never done this before and so, One of the first things I wanted to know was how many pages of colour my printer could actually print? Well, after doing a bit of online research, I go to know that the number of pages a printer can print mostly depends on the type of ink cartridge it is using.

HP Printer Ink cartridges tend to have different capacities and they tend to come as different models. A HP 22 ink cartridge for instance might print less pages than a HP 655 ink cartridge.

I have a printer that is using a HP 22 ink Tri-colour cartridge and so later found out that there is something called page yield and it's a sort of specification attached to an ink cartridge that specifies the amount of pages it can print. The HP 22 ink cartridge for instance was specicied as having a page yield of 170 pages meaning that it can print at most 170 pages of colour. Now, given that my friend wanted to print 500 pages of colour, it means that we are probably going to need about 3 units of HP 22 ink cartridges to get the job done. The need might vary a bit depending on the complexibility of the print output - e.g. A full page print or few lines of text.

The price of a HP 22 ink cartridge in Nigeria goes for about N3000($17) in Nigeria and for getting at least 3 units, we would need to spend at least N9000($51). The only other printing costs associated with this job would be the printing paper as well as my professional skills, electricity units consumed and depreciation of my printing machine. Well, I could waive off most of those costs for my friend but he would have to at least provide 500 pages of printing Paper and 3 units of HP 22 printing cartridges. That might see him spending around N10,000 for getting 500 pages of colour printed by me.

Well, I think this is considerable cost and could have still saved him a lot of money given that if he were to have done the job at a business center, he might have paid up to at least N25,000 and that's only assuming they charge him a discounted N50 per coloured page. The usual price for printing a single coloured page at a computer center in Nigeria is about N200 and 500 pages would mathematically cost up to N100,000. However the customer might get a discount since he's doing multiple jobs and so the least I can say he's going to get is about N50 per page.