Which ink does the HP ENVY 5530 use?

More people land here searching for ENVY 5530 toner than for its ink. There is no toner in this printer and none that fits it. Toner is a dry powder that a laser printer fuses into the paper. The ENVY 5530 is an inkjet, and it prints with liquid ink from a cartridge that carries its own nozzles underneath.

The parts it takes are the HP 61 cartridges: HP 61 black and HP 61 tri-color at the standard size, HP 61XL black and HP 61XL tri-color at high yield. There is no separate photo or grey tank on this model, so those four are the whole list. The number is printed on a label inside the cartridge door next to the carriage, which takes ten seconds to check and saves a return.

On running cost the high yield pair wins. HP rates the 61XL black at 480 pages for a list price of $35.00, which is 7.29c a page, against 190 pages at $18.00 for the standard 61 black, or 9.47c. Every page from the small cartridge costs about 23 percent more than the same page from the large one. The tri-color gap is narrower, 11.52c against 13.33c, near enough 14 percent. A high yield pair costs $73.00 against $40.00 for a standard pair, and prints well over twice as far before you buy again.

The tri-color design is where colour money goes. Cyan, magenta and yellow share one shell with no way to replace them separately, so the cartridge is spent when the first colour runs dry, however much of the other two is left. A coloured logo or a shaded table pulls from it. Set the driver to print in greyscale for ordinary documents and pick colour deliberately, and a tri-color cartridge stays in the printer months longer.

Firmware is not a worry here. The 5530 is a 2014 machine from before HP began enforcing Dynamic Security, and our record has it as open, with no chip check in the firmware. Compatible and remanufactured HP 61 and 61XL cartridges print normally, and they save more on this printer than the choice between standard and XL does. Order one cartridge from a seller with a plain return policy before committing to a multipack, so a badly built chip costs you one cartridge instead of four.

When the panel says a cartridge is missing or damaged, suspect the contacts before the cartridge. Lift it out, confirm the plastic pull tab and protective film are fully off, wipe the copper strip with a dry lint-free cloth and press it back until it clicks. If the message survives that, switch the printer off and unplug it at the wall for a minute with the cartridges still in. Faded or banded output is a separate fault and a new cartridge often will not fix it. Run a nozzle check and one cleaning cycle first, because dried ink on the head is the usual cause on a printer that has been sitting idle.

How much longer HP 61 stays in production is worth a thought before any of this. Five printers in our catalogue take the number and this one is the newest of them, so nothing has been designed around HP 61 since 2014. That does not put an end date on the supply, and HP has kept some retired numbers going for decades, but it is a reason to buy one spare set rather than several: part of HP's inkjet range refuses a cartridge that has aged past a date built into it, a policy HP documents itself. Our guide on whether a cartridge number is being discontinued, listed with the other guides further down this page, covers how to read the signal.