Calculating Page Coverage with AP Fill

Here at Refresh Cartridges we often get asked how many pages certain cartridges will print before they are empty. Customers will often seem surprised when we recall the figures given by the cartridges manufacturer as they can be substantially higher than the amount of pages they have got in the past. This is generally because the industry standard way of measuring page yield is at a 5% coverage on an A4 page.

The estimation of page coverage for a regular consumer can be rather difficult. So today I would like to point you in the direction of a wonderful free download named “AP Fill”. The download itself is available from a variety of places including the AVP Soft website. After a quick installation AP Fill will sit quietly in your system tray taking up precious little system resources.

From here page coverage can be easily calculated by pulling up a print preview of the document in question and selecting “RGB and B/W Coverage ratio (from Screen)” from AP fills minimalist menu. Then simply highlight the relevant area of the screen to be given a whole host of statistic relating to the page coverage.

This facility is most useful for working out coverage of black and white documents as the screen capture feature breaks down the information into red, blue and green (RGB) as this is how your monitor relays information. However most printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) to create an image so the standard installation of AP Fill is of limited use for such a task.

However a CMYK coverage ratio can be utilised but the full breakdown requires the installation of GhostScript which can be a little too tricky to set up for it to be recommendable to casual printers. Those looking to do large print runs or needing to work out the costs of such an exercise should find the investment of time worthwhile.

I will endeavour to write a blog in the near future that covers this feature.