Which ink does the HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e use?

The HP OfficeJet Pro 8025e uses the HP 910 family: standard HP 910 and high-yield HP 910XL, each in black, cyan, magenta and yellow.

The XL colors are an easy call and the XL black is not. Each XL color is rated at 825 pages for about $18.99, about 2.3 cents per page, roughly half the 4.44 cents of the standard color at 315 pages. The HP 910XL black is also rated at 825 pages but costs about $44.99, which works out at 5.45 cents per page. That still beats the 8.33 cents of the standard HP 910 black at 300 pages, so XL is the better buy on both sides, but black ink is clearly what this printer charges you for.

This is an HP+ machine, and that decision was made at setup. If it was enrolled in HP+, it is committed to genuine HP cartridges, Dynamic Security will refuse third-party chips, and the enrollment cannot be undone afterwards. If you declined HP+, compatible HP 910 cartridges work, and the thing worth protecting is your firmware: turn automatic updates off in the printer's embedded web server before you switch away from genuine ink. Instant Ink is the other thing HP will push on this model, and our breakdown of it covers what happens to the cartridges if you cancel.

Two other faults on this printer get mistaken for dead ink. Streaky or misaligned output is a print quality problem you fix from the tools menu with an alignment and a head clean, and no new cartridge will help. An ink system failure message points at the printhead rather than the cartridges, and it is worth a power cycle with the plug out of the wall for a minute before you conclude the printer is finished. If the panel instead calls a cartridge non-HP and says it again after every restart, that is Dynamic Security and reseating will not shift it.