Which ink does the HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 use?

The OfficeJet Pro 7740 uses the HP 952 family, and in practice that means 952XL: a 952XL black plus 952XL cyan, magenta and yellow, four separate cartridges with no shared body between the colours.

A full XL set costs $159.00. That number puts people off, and it is the wrong number to judge the printer by. The 952XL black is rated 2000 pages for $45.00, which is 2.25c a page, and each colour is 1600 pages for $38.00, or 2.38c. Out of the 82 inkjet black cartridges we hold prices for, that black is the seventh cheapest page on the site, against a median of 6.00c. What makes the set costly is how much ink it holds. Working the other way, the standard 952 black at 1000 pages for $28.00 costs 2.80c, so stepping up to the XL takes 20 percent off every page and there is no case for buying the smaller one.

For contrast inside our own catalogue, the HP DeskJet 4155e costs about 15.41c for a black page on its HP 67XL. The 7740 is the cheaper printer to feed by a wide margin, and the money you save is almost entirely down to cartridge size. Buying the more expensive printer is generally how you end up paying less for ink, which is not how most people expect the trade to work.

Firmware is the thing to weigh up on this model rather than price. HP applies Dynamic Security to the 7740, and it rejects a non HP chip after an update has installed, sometimes months after a compatible set has been printing without complaint. If you intend to run third party 952XL cartridges, decide about firmware updates before you buy them rather than afterwards, and read our ink DRM tracker for how the scheme has been applied across HP's range.

On a four cartridge machine, diagnose before you replace. A single missing colour with the others fine is a nozzle problem and belongs to the printhead cleaning routine, not to your wallet. A cartridge reported as damaged straight after fitting is usually contacts: remove it, wipe the copper pads and the matching contacts in the carriage with a dry lint free cloth, and seat it until it clicks. A cartridge that worked yesterday and is refused today, with nothing changed but a firmware update, is the Dynamic Security case and no amount of cleaning will move it.