Ink or toner cartridge’s lifetime depends on your printing practices. Manufacturers’ page yield is based on 5% page coverage. This means that only 5% of the page is covered with ink, such as a short, quarter-page memo. Ink use varies greatly if you’re using legal size paper, printing photos, graphics or full pages, and can cause your page count to drop significantly. A cartridge with a 4,000 page yield, for example, will run out of ink or toner at around 800 pages when used mainly to print full pages of text and graphics.