Which ink does the HP OfficeJet 8012 use?

The HP OfficeJet 8012 runs on the HP 910 family, and our record for this model lists a black in both sizes with the three colours in XL only. Each colour has its own tank, so an empty magenta costs you a magenta.

Colour is the cheap part of this printer, which surprises most people. An XL colour tank prints 825 pages for $18.99, or 2.30 cents. The XL black prints the same 825 pages for $44.99, or 5.45 cents, which makes a black page 2.37 times a colour one. Printing a report in greyscale to save money does the opposite here. The small black is worse again at 300 pages for $24.99, or 8.33 cents, so the XL black takes 35 percent off every page and pays for itself long before it runs out. Three XL colours together list at $56.97, and all four tanks come to $101.96.

Our tracker files this one under Dynamic Security. An update can teach it to refuse a non HP chip, so if you plan to buy third party ink, turn automatic updates off in the printer settings before the first cartridge goes in rather than after.

Separate tanks mean the print head belongs to the printer here, not to the cartridge. Faint or broken text after the machine has sat unused is dried ink in that head, and a cleaning cycle followed by a nozzle check fixes it while a new tank does not. The second consequence catches people out: the head draws a little ink from every tank when it services itself, so letting any one colour run bone dry costs you something even when the colour you need is full.