Your cartridge number is on the way out. Now what? the three options costed against each other, and why the answer is opposite for a laser and for an inkjet

Three options, and why the usual answer is the seller's answer

The options are not complicated. Buy the remaining original stock while it is on the shelf. Move to a compatible or remanufactured version and hope those keep being made. Or buy a new printer and start again on a number that has a future.

HP publishes its own explainer on this, and it repays a read for what it says and for what it declines to say. On why numbers get retired it is specific: older printer models gradually lose active users, smaller cartridge runs become inefficient, and production focuses on modern printer platforms. On what to do it says that upgrading your printer provides the best long term experience once cartridges become difficult to source. That may well be right for some readers. It is also the recommendation you would expect from a company that sells printers, and the same page never states how long any given number will stay in production, which is the one fact that would let you decide for yourself.

So the decision has to come from the numbers you can see, and there are only three of them: what your current machine costs to run per page, what a replacement would cost to run per page, and how many pages you print in a month. Everything below is those three computed from our catalogue, with the arithmetic shown so you can repeat it on your own model.

The 46 machines this applies to, and the split inside them

Our catalogue holds 257 printers and the 248 cartridge families they take. 43 of those families have never appeared in a printer launched after 2014, and 46 printers sit on top of them: 28 HP, 10 Brother, 5 Canon and 3 Epson. The companion guide covers how that is measured and what it does and does not prove.

The split that matters here is by machine type. 26 of them are cartridge inkjets and 20 are lasers, and those two groups face a different problem despite sharing a diagnosis. The reason is visible the moment you put their running costs next to a current machine.

An orphaned mono laser costs 3.11c a page with its drum counted in. A current one costs 2.40c. That gap is 0.71 of a cent, and no purchase pays itself back on a margin that thin. An orphaned cartridge inkjet costs 17.5c a page. A current refillable tank machine costs 1.22c, a gap of 16.3c, which is a different situation entirely.

Being orphaned is not what makes the inkjet expensive. Current cartridge inkjets in the catalogue run 18.3c a page, which is no cheaper. The cartridge format is the expensive part, and an old machine simply gives you a reason to look at it.

If it is a laser, buy one spare and keep the printer

20 of the orphaned machines are lasers, mostly Brother and HP mono workhorses from the early 2010s. Two things make this the easy case.

First, a toner set carries 2,600 pages against 415 for an ink set, so a single spare covers years of home printing where the ink set covers months. Second, toner is a dry powder in a sealed cartridge and does not have the drying problem that governs how long ink keeps. Brother states a three year shelf life from date of production for its own ink cartridges, and toner is the more stable of the two materials. Between them those two facts mean a laser owner can buy their way out of a supply problem, which an inkjet owner mostly cannot.

Take the Brother HL-2270DW, a 2011 machine on the TN-450 toner. That cartridge is $58.00 at list for 2,600 pages, which is 2.23c a page. Add the DR-420 drum at $104.99 for 12,000 pages and you are at 3.11c. A current mono laser will not beat that by enough to notice. On the median gap of 0.71c, a $200.00 replacement needs 28,341 pages before it breaks even, which at 50 pages a month is 47 years.

Check the drum before you order. On these machines it is a second consumable with its own number and its own retirement clock, and 10 of the orphaned lasers list one separately, adding a median 0.80c a page. If you are buying a spare toner, price a spare drum at the same time, because a machine with toner and no drum is as stopped as a machine with neither. The drum guide covers how to tell which one your printer is asking for.

If it is a cartridge inkjet, the printed date caps how far ahead you can buy

Ink is where buying ahead stops being straightforward, and the reason is the combination of a small set and a dated cartridge. The median orphaned inkjet here gets 415 pages from a full set, so at ordinary home volumes one set already lasts a long time.

Read the middle column and the ceiling appears on its own. At 25 pages a month, one spare set is 17 months of printing, so two sets is about 2.8 years, which is already past the point where the ink is being sold on its printed date. Buying a third set is buying something you will be using well outside what the maker rates it for. So the practical cap on an inkjet stockpile is one or two sets, and chemistry sets it, not your budget.

Expired ink is not usually a brick. On most machines the printer will complain and let you carry on, and what you lose is print quality, not the ability to print. There is a narrow exception on some very old HP inkjets that stop when a cartridge passes a built-in date, and HP says of that feature that it has not manufactured a printer with it for many years and that very few of those systems remain in use. If your machine is on that list, a stockpile buys you less than it looks like it does. The expiry guide covers how to read the date and how to store spares so they reach it in good shape.

Worked example. The HP ENVY 4500 from 2013 takes HP 61 and HP 61XL. The best value pairing is $73.00 for 330 pages, or 22.1c. Two spare sets is $146.00 of ink covering 660 pages. That is a real answer for a light user and a poor one for anybody printing weekly.

The crossover: about 34 pages a month

For the inkjet owner the two options can be compared directly, because both come down to cost per page. Staying put costs the orphaned inkjet median. Moving to a current refillable tank machine costs 1.22c a page, a saving of 16.3c on every page you print from then on. Divide the price of the replacement by that saving and you get the number of pages at which the new machine has paid for itself.

Those page counts are modest. What decides the question is how long they take you, which is why the same $200.00 machine is a good buy at 100 pages a month and a bad one at 25. So put the two strategies on the same clock. A stockpile is good for about three years before the ink is outside what the maker rates it for. If the replacement pays for itself inside that same window, buying ahead was never the cheaper move.

For a $200.00 tank machine that line sits at roughly 34 pages a month. Print less than that and the ink you can safely stockpile will outlast the payback period, so buy a set or two and keep the printer until it dies of something else. Print more and you are feeding an expensive format from a shrinking supply for no reason.

Two things this arithmetic leaves out, and they pull against each other. It uses list prices, and retired numbers are often discounted while stock clears, which argues for buying ahead. It also ignores the chance that the printer itself dies during the payback period, which argues for not stockpiling much. Neither is big enough to move the crossover out of the range in the table.

The third-party route, and the two ways it closes

The middle option is to stop buying the original and move to a compatible or remanufactured version. For most of these machines that works and it is cheaper. It is a different kind of supply from the original, and it helps to know what it runs on.

Remanufactured stock is built from returned empties. ETIRA, the European trade body for the industry, describes remanufacturing as an industrial process in which spent cartridges are disassembled, cleaned, refilled and engineered to become as new, and notes that the supply of empty cartridges, and hence their price, is determined to a significant extent by the willingness of the makers to release empties for reuse. A number whose installed base is shrinking returns fewer empties every year, so remanufactured supply for a retired number tends to thin out gradually rather than stop on a date. Newly built compatibles do not have that constraint, and they last as long as somebody thinks the tooling is worth running.

The other way it closes is firmware. Those are independent risks and the catalogue tracks both: 60 of our 257 printers can refuse a third-party cartridge after an update, and 2 of them are also on a retired number. That is the genuinely bad case, because the original is being wound down and the substitute can be locked out. If your machine is in it, the choice narrows to buying ahead or replacing, and the crossover above is the whole decision. The firmware tracker lists which machines lock and which supply band each one sits in.

One caution specific to scarce numbers. The UK Intellectual Property Office warned in March 2026 that counterfeit cartridges circulate in packaging designed to look like the genuine article, with leaking, clogging and damage to printer components among the consequences, and it lists checks on packaging, price and authorised sellers. A review by The American Prospect in August 2024 found 131 ink listings for home printers whose packaging imitated brand name products, and that those listings were often not cheaper than the real thing. Old stock of a retired number is exactly the market where that shows up. Buying a genuine compatible from a named seller is fine, and buying an original at a suspiciously good price from a marketplace listing with no seller history is where people get caught. We do not publish third-party prices for these numbers, because our catalogue holds only 5 priced third-party rows and a median of that would be a guess dressed up as data.

What none of this proves

The band your number sits in measures one thing: no printer launched after 2014 has ever used it. That is a real signal about where the maker is putting new tooling. It is not an announcement, and it is not a date.

HP 61 is a fair test of that. It is on five printers in our catalogue and none of them is newer than 2014, so by this measure it is orphaned. Asked directly whether the number is discontinued, HP answers no, that it is still available, and that portions of the lineup are being refreshed with updated configurations and yields while some older configurations reach end of life. The same page gives no indication of how long the number will be supplied. Elsewhere an HP community expert has said that while printers may be discontinued after a year or two, cartridges tend to have a very long production life, often several decades, and that very few are discontinued at all.

Take both at face value. A number with no new host printers is more exposed than one still going into current hardware, and most exposed numbers will still be on sale for years. Which is why the decision on this page is built on running cost and print volume rather than on a prediction about when the ink runs out. Those inputs are knowable, and the answer they give is worth acting on whether or not the number ever actually goes.

The decision, in order

1. Laser or inkjet? If it is a laser, buy one spare toner, price a spare drum at the same time, and keep the printer. The running cost gap to a current machine is 0.71c a page and no replacement earns that back.
2. Inkjet: how many pages a month? Count a normal month rather than guessing. This is the input the whole thing turns on.
3. Under about 34 a month? Buy one or two spare sets and stop there. A third set will be outside its rated life before you reach it, and the replacement would not have paid for itself inside that window either.
4. Over about 34 a month? A refillable tank machine at 1.22c a page pays for itself in 1,227 pages at $200.00. Buy one set of ink to cover the changeover and stop buying the old number.
5. Check the firmware either way. If your machine can lock out third-party cartridges, the compatible fallback may not be there when the original goes, which argues for deciding sooner.

Then look up your own model rather than the median. The printer pages here list every cartridge the machine takes with list price and rated yield, so the cost per page and the payback are yours to compute in a minute with the arithmetic above.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Is your cartridge number being discontinued? the check that tells you whether this page applies to you.
• Do ink and toner cartridges expire? the shelf life that caps how far ahead it is worth buying.
• Ink tank vs cartridge printers: is refillable worth it? the replacement option, costed on its own terms.
• Which printers are cheapest to run? if you do replace, start with running cost rather than the sticker price.
• Drum unit vs toner: when to replace one the second consumable a laser owner needs to price before stocking up.
• OEM vs compatible vs remanufactured what you are actually choosing between if you take the third-party route.
• Is the XL cartridge actually cheaper? what a stockpile of the bigger size actually costs per page.

Sources

1. HP, Why HP Ink Cartridges Get Discontinued And What You Should Do Next, HP Tech Takes, for HP's stated reasons for retiring older ink cartridges (older printer models gradually losing active users, smaller cartridge runs becoming inefficient, production focusing on modern printer platforms), for the recommendation that upgrading your printer provides the best long term experience once cartridges become difficult to source, for the statement that as inventory declines prices may increase and long term availability becomes less predictable, and for the absence of any stated supply duration. hp.com
2. HP, HP 61 and HP 63/65 Ink Cartridge FAQ, HP Tech Takes, for HP's answer that HP 61 is not discontinued and is still available, that portions of the lineup are being refreshed with updated configurations and yields, that some older HP 61 configurations are reaching end of life, and that the page states no period for which the number will continue to be supplied. hp.com
3. HP Support Community, Printer/ink cartridge obsolescence, thread 7086443, accepted solution, for the statement that while printers may be discontinued after a year or two, HP cartridges tend to have a very long production life of several or more decades from introduction, and that very few cartridges are discontinued. hp.com
4. HP, Aging Ink Supplies Stop Working to Protect the Ink System, support document c01764161, for the design in which certain HP printers stop cartridges working at a built-in date calculated from installation, for the fact that some of those systems allow an override and others do not, and for HP's statement that it has not manufactured a printer with this feature for many years and that very few of these systems remain in use. hp.com
5. Brother, support answer 149296, for the published shelf life of three years from date of production for Brother INKvestment LC20E ink cartridges, for the instruction to use cartridges before the use by date printed on the packaging, and for the note that an installed cartridge should be used within six months. brother-usa.com
6. ETIRA, the European Toner and Inkjet Remanufacturers Association, Frequently Asked Questions, for the description of remanufacturing as an industrial process in which spent cartridges are disassembled, cleaned, refilled and engineered to become as new, and for the statement that the supply of empty cartridges, and hence their price, is determined to a significant extent by the willingness of the OEMs to make empties available for reuse. etira.org
7. UK Intellectual Property Office, Fake toner, real trouble: protect your printers from counterfeits, 12 March 2026, for the listed consequences of counterfeit cartridges including leaking, clogging, colour inaccuracy and damage to printer components, and for the checks on packaging, price and authorised sellers. ipo.blog.gov.uk
8. The American Prospect, Amazon Still Has a Counterfeit Problem, 28 August 2024, for the review that found 131 ink cartridge listings for home printers whose packaging looked like brand name products from HP, Epson, Canon and Brother, and for the finding that those listings were often not cheaper than the genuine cartridges. prospect.org
9. Printer and cartridge counts, supply bands, list prices, rated yields and every cost per page, payback and stockpile figure on this page come from our own catalogue of printers and the OEM supplies they take, at manufacturer list prices. Cost per page uses the best value cartridge in each colour slot and divides the cost of a full changeover by the shortest lived cartridge in that set; drum units are costed separately and added for lasers. Payback is the price of a replacement divided by the saving per page. The stockpile ceiling uses a three year shelf life. mycartridgefinder.com

Last updated 13 September 2026. This guide is general information, not a repair warranty. Printer menus and HP's model lists change, so confirm the exact steps for your model on the manufacturer's support site before you make changes.