Which ink does the HP DeskJet 3632 use?

The DeskJet 3632 takes the HP 63 family and nothing else: the HP 63 and the HP 63XL, each in black and tri-color. Those four cartridges cover everything the printer does, because there is no separate photo tank.

It is an expensive machine to run. The HP 63XL black prints 480 pages for $37.00, which works out at 7.71c. The HP 934XL black on the OfficeJet Pro 6230 in our catalogue does the same job for 3.80c, so a black page on this DeskJet costs about twice as much. The 63XL tri-color is worse again at 12.12c, and a tri-color cartridge is finished as soon as any one of its three chambers empties, whatever is left in the other two.

The XL step helps less here than on most HP families. It takes the black from 10.00c down to 7.71c, a saving of about 23 percent, and the tri-color from 13.94c to 12.12c, about 13 percent. A full XL set is $77.00 against $42.00 for the standard pair. On a printer that sees a few pages a week, what the XL mainly buys is fewer trips to the shop.

The 3632 carries no HP+ enrollment and does not appear on our lockout list, so compatible and remanufactured HP 63 cartridges are where the running cost genuinely moves on this printer. Buy a single cartridge and confirm the printer reads it before committing to a multipack.

A new cartridge that reads as empty or missing has usually kept the protective tape over its contacts and nozzles, so check that before anything else, then wipe the copper contacts with a dry lint free cloth. For streaky or broken text, run the cleaning routine from the HP software before replacing anything. The printhead on this model is built into the cartridge itself, and a clean often revives a unit the printer had written off.