Which ink does the HP ENVY 110 use?

There is no ENVY 110 toner to buy, and the printer does not need any. It is an inkjet, so it prints with liquid ink from a cartridge, where toner is the powder a laser printer melts onto the page. The parts you want come from the HP 60 family.

That family is four cartridges here. The standard HP 60 comes in black and tri-color, and the high yield HP 60XL comes in the same two colours. Nothing else fits, and there is no separate photo cartridge on this model. The number is printed inside the cartridge door if you want to confirm it before ordering.

High yield is the cheaper way to run it, by a wider margin than most printers of its size manage. The HP 60XL black is rated 600 pages for $35.00, which works out at 5.83c a page, against 200 pages at $15.00 for the standard HP 60 black, or 7.50c. That takes about 22 percent off every black page. The tri-color moves further, 9.16c on the 60XL against 12.12c on the standard, near enough 24 percent. A standard pair costs $35.00 and a high yield pair $73.00.

Put that 5.83c beside the rest of the ENVY range and this old machine holds up well. The same page costs 7.29c on the ENVY 5530 running an HP 61XL and 6.33c on the ENVY Photo 7855 running an HP 64XL, so a working 110 with high yield cartridges in it is cheaper per page than either of its successors. If you were weighing a new printer against keeping this one, running cost is not the argument for switching.

Firmware is not an argument either. The ENVY 110 dates from 2011, long before HP began locking supplies, and its database record has it as open with no chip check in the firmware. Compatible and remanufactured HP 60 and 60XL cartridges work, and on a printer this old they usually cost far less than the genuine list price. Order one from a seller with a clear return policy before buying several, so an unread chip costs you a single cartridge.

Two faults account for most of what goes wrong. A cartridge reported as missing or incompatible is nearly always a contact problem: take it out, check the pull tab and film are completely removed, wipe the copper contacts with a dry lint-free cloth, reseat until it clicks, and if that fails leave the printer unplugged for a minute. Streaky or patchy colour is a head problem rather than an empty cartridge, and a printer that goes weeks between jobs is the classic cause. Run the built in cleaning cycle once, print again, and only repeat it if the page improved, since every cycle spends ink.

The HP 60 family is the oldest supply situation on this site's inkjet side. Its newest host machine in our catalogue dates to 2011, the same year the ENVY 110 launched, which makes fifteen years without new hardware behind the number. A cartridge family can outlive its printers by a long way, so this is not a countdown. The practical hazard is the age of what is on the shelf, because ink is a liquid that degrades in storage, so date check whatever you buy and read the guide on cartridge discontinuation near the end of this page before buying more than a set.