HP 902XL cyan · XL

The HP 902XL cyan is a single cyan tank for five printers in our database: the OfficeJet 6958, OfficeJet 6962, OfficeJet Pro 6968, OfficeJet Pro 6970 and OfficeJet Pro 6978. It is bought on its own, so an empty cyan costs you one cartridge rather than a whole colour set.

Our catalog carries no standard size colour for this family, only the XL, so the usual standard versus high yield decision does not arise. What you get is 825 pages at a list price of $30.00, or 3.64 cents for a page of cyan. The magenta and the yellow are rated and priced the same, which makes the colour side of this printer unusually easy to budget for. Three tanks together come to $90.00.

All five of these printers carry HP Dynamic Security, so they sit on our firmware lockout list. A compatible 902XL cyan can work for months and then be rejected on the day the printer updates itself. Turning off automatic updates is the single setting that decides whether that happens, and it is worth doing before you fit the first third-party tank rather than after.

When cyan goes missing from prints while the other colours look right, the tank is rarely the problem. The print head is built into this printer and stays there when cartridges are swapped, so a blocked cyan nozzle survives a cartridge change and a new tank will not clear it. Run a nozzle check, read which block is broken up, then run one cleaning cycle and check again. Repeat cycles spend ink from every tank, so stop as soon as the pattern stops improving.

If the printer reports the cartridge as missing or damaged the moment it goes in, that is a contact fault or a firmware block, and the two read differently. Reseating with the tape off and the copper contacts wiped dry clears the first. Wording that calls the cartridge unauthorised or not genuine HP is the second, and no amount of reseating will move it.