So you’ve dropped by the office supply store to pick up some ink for your AIO printer, but it has turned out to be not as simple as you thought it would be: Your high-end, high-volume, office-friendly AIO has three different-size tanks available for it, and depending on where you look, ink cartridges are widely priced, with an even wider page-yield per cartridge. In fact, depending on the type of printer and the cartridges it uses, I’ve seen ink tanks that lasted for only 100 or so pages—all the way up to ink cartridges that hold about 9,000 prints and beyond.
Page yields come from the manufacturers, but these companies don’t get to just assign a set of numbers to a product and move on. Instead, page-yields are derived by deploying a rather rigid set of rules laid down by the International Organization for Standardization, the ISO. The ISO provides guidelines not just for electronics, but for just about everything else you can think of, including information security, food safety management, and environmental management—you name it, the ISO can develop standards and publish them.
Read the entire article at About.com.