Which ink does the HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 use?

The HP OfficeJet Pro 9025 takes the HP 962 family: the standard 962 black, and the 962XL in black, cyan, magenta and yellow. It is worth checking which machine you have before ordering, because HP also sells a 9025e, a later variant of the same design with the same ink but different terms attached to it.

The XL pays in every slot on this family. The 962XL black is rated at 2,000 pages and lists at $63.99, which is 3.20c a page, where the standard 962 black is 1,000 pages at $43.99, or 4.40c. That is about 27 percent off. Each 962XL colour is rated at 1,600 pages for $49.99, or 3.12c, against 4.43c on the standard colour, about 29 percent off. A page carrying all four inks costs roughly 12.57 cents on XLs. There is no mixed basket to work out here: if the machine gets enough use to finish them, buy XLs throughout.

The 9025 is on our firmware lockout list. It belongs to the 2019 OfficeJet Pro generation, which shipped with Dynamic Security firmware that can start refusing cartridges with non HP chips. Compatible 962 cartridges are widely sold and plenty of people run them without trouble, but the failure tends to arrive months later with a firmware update rather than on the day the cartridge goes in. Turning automatic updates off in the embedded web server before you commit to third party ink is worth doing first.

The 9025 keeps its print head in the printer, so a colour that has stopped appearing is not necessarily a cartridge problem. Print the diagnostic page from the printer's tools menu and read the four colour blocks before you order anything. Gaps or a missing block point at a dried channel that a cleaning cycle usually clears. If the printer names a specific cartridge instead, check the contacts and reseat it, and note whether the message started with a new compatible or with a cartridge that had been printing for weeks, because those two cases have different causes and only one of them is fixed by cleaning.