Times New Roman vs Bitstream Vera Serif

Many of you might have noticed that the Bitstream Vera Serif font being rather large relative to it's point size. To satisfy my own curiosity I went to town with OpenOffice.org Writer and used lorem ipsum to fill a single page (A4, 1" margins), with text, and counting the characters on the page using both Times and Vera at different point sizes:

First the Times counts:

• 12 pt, 4796 chars, 100%
• 11 pt, 5733 chars, 120%
• 10.5 pt, 6220 chars, 130%
• 10 pt, 6908 chars, 144%

And the Vera Serif counts:

• 12 pt, 3461 chars, 70%
  
• 11 pt, 4216 chars, 88%
  
• 10.5 pt, 4592 chars, 96%
  
• 10 pt, 5088 chars, 106 %
  
• 9 pt, 6343 chars, 132%

As you can size there's a rather large difference with Vera at 10/10.5 being equivalent to Times at 12 pt. After some more testing it seems to be Vera's width which contributes most to it being large.