HP 902 black · standard

The HP 902 is the standard-yield black cartridge in HP's 902 family. Five printers in our database take it: the OfficeJet 6958 and 6962, and the OfficeJet Pro 6968, 6970 and 6978. They are all inkjets from the same generation, and the same 902 and 902XL cartridges cover the lot.

It is a small cartridge. Rated at about 300 pages with a list price near $18, it works out around 6.0 cents for every black page. The high-yield 902XL black in the same family prints about 825 pages for around $38, or about 4.6 cents, so anyone printing more than the occasional letter is better off buying XL black. The standard 902 makes sense as a stopgap, or for a printer that sits unused most weeks and would rather not have ink drying in a large cartridge.

Read the firmware note before you buy a compatible. All five printers that take this cartridge are on our firmware lockout list, because they shipped with HP Dynamic Security, which can start rejecting non-HP chips after the printer installs a firmware update. A compatible 902 can work for months and then stop being recognized on the day the printer updates itself. If you want to run third-party ink in one of these, buy from a seller who states current firmware compatibility, turn automatic printer updates off, and keep the receipt.

When a genuine 902 is not recognized, the cause is almost always the contacts or a leftover tab. Pull the cartridge, remove any tape, wipe the copper contacts with a dry lint-free cloth and reseat until it clicks, then power cycle with the printer unplugged for a minute. A refusal that appears the moment a compatible goes in is a different problem and points at Dynamic Security instead. If black comes out blank while the colors are fine after a spell of not printing, run a cleaning cycle before you write the cartridge off.