Duplicate Content Revisited

Anyone care to speculate on the percentage of difference needed?

[dmje]

Anyone care to speculate on the percentage of difference needed in the content of pages to avoid the duplicate content issue?
Our website sells many different products and in many instances we are given canned descriptions by the supplier which we try to modify as best we can but some of the descriptions are only a few lines and describe the product very concisely and it is difficult to change the description very much at all.

We make sure that each page whether it be a product page or a large image page has a different title and description meta tags, which even that can be difficult at times when you have many different colors of the same product.

The reason for this question is because I used a similar page checking tool against my site and another site that I know that sells the same particular product and found that even with the title tags and meta descriptions being different and the product descriptions being as different as we can make them, the checker showed an 85% similarity between the product pages, whereas, the large image pages only show a 12% similarity and I assume this due to there being much less text on that type of page with the only thing most likely being identical is the photo.

I looked closely at both the other sites product page and mine for that item and our content is similar yet different, there are only so many ways you can describe a child's trike......short of completely doing away with the canned descriptions and attempting to write my own I am at a loss as what to do.

Could any of this similarity be due to the fact that both sites happen to use the same hosting company and both domains reside on the same server at the hosting company?

Sorry for the long rambling post, but I do not want to beat my head against the wall and spend hours and hours and hours trying to make my product pages completely different from the others out there that sell the same items when the best I can get is a 15-20% difference if that isnt enough.