Which ink/toner does the HP LaserJet Pro M15w use?

Plenty of people arrive here searching for M15w ink, and this printer does not use ink. The LaserJet Pro M15w is a laser, so it takes toner powder in a single cartridge: the HP CF248A in black, rated for 1000 pages at $60.00. There is no colour cartridge and HP never made a high yield version, so the only decision left is where you buy the CF248A.

That $60.00 over 1000 pages comes to 6.00c a page. Our catalogue holds 48 distinct black cartridges for mono laser printers and the median among them prints a page for 3.69c, with only two costing more than the CF248A. Brother's TN-880 does it for 1.33c, roughly four and a half times cheaper. The M15w is cheap to buy, and among the mono lasers we list very few cost more per page to keep running.

HP publishes a dynamic security notice for the M15w on its own store page. The printer is intended to work only with cartridges carrying a new or reused HP chip, and a firmware update can refuse a compatible CF248A that had been printing perfectly well the week before. With one cartridge number and no XL tier, a compatible is the only lever you have on the running cost, so a block leaves you paying 6.00c a page for as long as you keep the printer.

The defence is to hold the update rather than argue with it afterwards. Set firmware updates to do not check in the HP Smart app or in the printer's built in web page before the first compatible cartridge goes in. Our guide to disabling HP Dynamic Security has the menu paths, and this model is listed on our firmware lockout tracker.

A block is easy to recognise once you know the pattern. The compatible cartridge prints for weeks, the printer updates itself overnight, and the next morning the panel reports a cartridge problem or a non HP chip on a cartridge that is physically fine. A dirty contact behaves differently: it usually fails from the very first page and often clears when you pull the cartridge out and seat it again. Faint or streaky pages are a different problem again, and there is something to try before you spend anything. Take the cartridge out, rock it gently end to end to spread the remaining powder, and refit it. On a cartridge near the end of its life that is often good for another few dozen pages.