HP 902XL yellow · XL

The HP 902XL yellow fits the OfficeJet 6958, OfficeJet 6962, OfficeJet Pro 6968, OfficeJet Pro 6970 and OfficeJet Pro 6978. It is the tank people are most often surprised to be buying, because very little of what comes out of an office printer looks yellow.

The surprise has a cause. The print head in these printers pulls ink from all four tanks when it runs a servicing cycle, whether or not you asked for colour, and composite blacks and greys in a document pull yellow as well. So the yellow drains on a machine that has printed nothing but invoices, and when it runs out the printer stops rather than carrying on in black.

Cost is the same as the other two colours: 825 pages at $30.00, or 3.64 cents a page, against 4.61 cents for the 902XL black. Buying the three colours together comes to $90.00.

Each of the five printers appears on our firmware lockout list. They shipped with HP Dynamic Security, so a compatible that prints today can be refused after an update. Turn automatic updates off before the first third-party tank goes in, and buy one at a time from a seller who states current firmware compatibility rather than committing to a multipack.

Yellow is the hardest colour to judge on a nozzle check. Print the test page on plain white paper and look at the yellow block edge on, in daylight if you can, because gaps in it are almost invisible under warm indoor light. If the block is solid and prints still look wrong, the fault is in one of the other three.