What this tool does
Estimate ink use per channel. Set coverage percentages per channel — cyan, magenta, yellow, black, a page count and your printer's ml-per-page baseline; get millilitres per colour and a cost.
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Four channels, not one number
Ink is not a single quantity. A page that is 60% cyan and nothing else drains one cartridge and leaves the other three alone, and a run of them will have you replacing cyan four times before magenta runs low.
So this estimator asks for each channel separately. Enter a coverage percentage for each of cyan, magenta, yellow, black, then the number of pages, and it reports millilitres per colour, a total, and a cost at your price per millilitre.
The baseline, and why you should change it
The default assumes one millilitre of a single channel covers a full A4 page at 100% coverage, and that coverage scales linearly below that.
Both parts are approximations. Real consumption depends on the head, the droplet size, the paper, the driver's quality setting and how much ink goes to head cleaning rather than to the page. Draft mode can halve it. Photo paper at best quality can double it.
If you know your own printer better — from a cartridge volume divided by pages actually achieved — put that number in the baseline field. The estimate is only as good as that one figure.
Guessing coverage
Hard to eyeball, so here are anchors.
Plain text on white is around 5% black and nothing else, which is what cartridge yield ratings assume. A worksheet with a header band and some rules sits nearer 15%. A colouring page outline is low black, maybe 10%. A full-page photo runs 60% to 80% across all four channels together, and a solid dark background can push past that.
Rich blacks are the trap: designers build them from all four channels for depth, so a page that looks black is often laying down 40% or more of each colour channel underneath the black.
Cost per millilitre
Divide the cartridge price by its volume in ml, which is printed on the box or in the specification.
The spread here is enormous. Small OEM cartridges routinely work out at £1.50 to £2.50 a millilitre, high-yield ones at half that, and refillable tank systems at a few pence — a genuine hundredfold difference, which is why the same job can be trivially cheap on one machine and not worth doing on another.
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For the whole job including paper, use the print cost estimator.
FAQs
Quick answers
How is ink coverage measured?
Coverage is the percentage of a page that a single CMYK channel covers at full density. A pure black photo background is ~100% K coverage; a sparse text page is closer to 5%.
How much ink does an A4 page actually use?
A typical A4 page at 5% coverage uses around 0.05 ml per channel on a desktop inkjet. High-coverage photo prints can hit 1.5 ml per channel.
Is ml-per-page the same on every printer?
No. Droplet size, head technology, and dry-back vary widely between brands. Treat the estimate as a planning figure, not a billing figure.
How can I reduce ink usage?
Use draft mode for proofs, prefer line art over photos when possible, and avoid full-bleed colour backgrounds. Greyscale prints cut CMY usage to near zero.
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