A printed side and a sheet have different costs
A ten-page document printed once has ten printed sides. Single-sided printing uses ten sheets; duplex printing normally uses five. Ink or toner is still applied to ten sides, so the calculator reduces paper use without automatically halving the supply estimate. For separate copies, sheet rounding happens per copy: two copies of a three-page report need four duplex sheets, not three.
The supply estimate divides each cartridge price by its expected yield. In black-only mode it uses the black cartridge. Color mode adds the individual black, cyan, magenta and yellow contributions, allowing different prices and yields. That model is an assumption about the print job; a printer may use composite colors for gray or consume ink during cleaning. Check your printer configuration and compare the estimate with observed usage.
Rated yield is measured under specified test conditions, not guaranteed for every report or photograph. The expected-yield percentage lets you model what your own workload achieves. At 80%, a rated 2,000-side cartridge is treated as 1,600 sides. This control does not inspect the document’s ink coverage. Pages counted from a PDF include blanks, and the tool does not predict a printer’s skip-blank-page behavior.
Paper cost comes from the pack price divided by the number of sheets in the pack. Optional spare sheets add paper only; increase copies when you want to budget complete reprinted sets. Labor, maintenance and setup are separate inputs so an estimate can explain its total. Monthly cost repeats the same job the selected number of times. Taxes, delivery and costs left at zero are excluded, and changing a currency label does not convert prices.