Printer duty cycles: How many pages can a printer print in a month?

When a litigation team is preparing for a trial, a litigation support professional will often be asked to select the hardware needed for a remote 'war room' set up in a hotel or leased office space. The printers you acquire for a trial may not only be put to heavy use for your trial, but they may also have been used to print out large amounts of pages for other firms which leased them previously. When you're trying to determine whether or not a printer will handle the amount of printing necessary to prepare dozens of witness binders each day for the duration of a trial, look further than just the listed page per minute rate and the paper tray capacity. In the posted specs for a printer, HP or another manufacturer should list the recommended page volume per month and the monthly duty cycle.

The monthly duty cycle is the absolute maximum number of pages that a printer can print out in a one month period.

The recommended monthly page volume is the highest number of pages the manufacturer recommends that you print within a month.

The difference between the duty cycle and the recommended page volume is similar to the difference between the highest possible speed a car can reach and the speed at which it can be regularly driven without causing mechanical problems. A passenger car might be able to reach a speed of 130 mph, but if the same car is driven frequently at 90 mph it soon becomes unreliable.

The recommended monthly page volume will be usually less than 10 per cent of the duty cycle.