Not so long ago, in December 2006, International Standardization Organization finally gave us, customers, a single standard to estimate cartridge performance and thus the printing costs. Before that, printer manufacturers used various ways to determine how many pages a cartridge would print. It was merely impossible to calculate true sum money spent on cartridges during printer’s lifespan, decisive information for many customers.

The standard was created and accepted by a consortium of printer manufacturers, including such major brand as HP, Canon, Epson and Lexmark. During the test, adopted into standard, both black and color cartridges are run continuously, until each of the cartridges is out of ink, according to printer message.

However, HP said some oversights and time constrictions accepted in the standard hinder a true measurement of cost of ownership. Whitney Loper, writing systems engineer at HP said to PCWorld.co.uk:

“Whilst we welcome the standard as an overall way of regulating the industry and giving consumers information, there are some important aspects that we feel have been left out”

First, during the test printers in general perform better on a continuous run of inks. Besides, doesn’t really reflect how printers are actually used – few pages now, few weeks of idling then – which bring us to the second issue – time limitation. A continuous print test takes only a week, while test in real life printing condition would take indefinite amount of time. Another thing the photo test was performed on glossy paper and didn’t considered absorption rates of other types of paper.

“This is something we have said all along but we have had to compromise with certain aspects of this standard because of the amount of manufacturers and industries taking part,” said Loper.

Since the standard is not likely to be approved before 2008, HP hopes to address some the issues in the next working draft of the standard.