Troubleshooting & Analysis
The first time my old cartridge died on me, it didn't die clean. It went out mid-page — a shipping label I needed in the next four minutes — and the black just... thinned. Streaked. Then quit halfway down with that pale, ghosty banding that means the sponge inside has dried out and started starving. I shook it. Of course I shook it. Everybody shakes it. It bought me maybe six more lines before the printer threw the empty warning and refused to do anything but blink at me. That was a genuine HP 67 in my 4122E, by the way. So before anyone tells me the brand-name one never lets you down: it does. They all run dry. The only real question is what you pay to refill the thing.
And that's the part that finally broke me. I went to reorder the official high-yield 67XL black and the single cartridge was sitting at around $40. Forty dollars. For a printer that didn't cost a whole lot more than that. I stood there in the app doing the math you're probably doing right now: I print maybe a couple hundred pages a month — labels, kids' homework, the occasional boarding pass — so I'm burning through ink fast enough that the cartridge costs more per year than the hardware did. That's the trap, and HP knows it. The machine is cheap because the refills aren't.
So I did the thing I'd been nervous to do
I bought the compatible 67XL instead. Same high-yield part number, third-party cartridge, and it ran me right around $20 for the black — call it half of what HP wanted. I'll be honest, I expected to regret it. I'd read the horror stories about chips not registering and printers throwing a fit. So I went in skeptical, ready to send it back the same day.
Install was genuinely nothing. You pop the cover on the 2722E — or the 4122E, or 6022E, same family, same cartridge — wait for the carriage to slide over and stop, and press the little tab to release the dead one. It lifts straight out. The new cartridge has a strip of protective tape over the contacts and the vent; peel all of it, don't leave a corner stuck on, then drop it into the slot until it clicks. That click matters. If you don't hear and feel it seat, the printer reads it as missing. Ran a test print, sharp black text on the first pass, no priming dance. Maybe two minutes start to finish.
How it actually prints
Text? Honestly indistinguishable from OEM. I print a lot of black-on-white — labels, forms, school stuff — and the edges are crisp, the fill is solid, no gray cast. If your life is mostly documents, you will not be able to tell which cartridge made the page, and neither will anyone you hand it to.
Color is where I'll give you the real talk. It's good. It's not perfectly identical. Side by side against a page I'd printed earlier with the genuine tri-color, the compatible skews just a hair cooler — blues a touch deeper, skin tones in a photo slightly less warm. For a pie chart, a coupon, a worksheet, a map? Completely fine, nobody on earth would notice. If you're printing gallery photos you actually want to frame, that small shift might bug you, and for that one job I'd tell you to think twice. For everything else I print, it's a non-issue.
The downsides, because there always are some
Let me actually sit on this part instead of waving it off, because the honest stuff is what you came here for.
First, the chip handshake. My printer recognized the cartridge instantly, but the first time it woke up the firmware threw a "non-genuine HP" notice — a yellow warning screen telling me I was using a cartridge HP didn't make. Which, yes, I know. That's the entire point. You click through it once, tell it to continue, and it prints exactly the same forever after. But it's worth knowing HP nags you. And here's the real caveat: if you let your printer auto-update its firmware, there's a small ongoing risk a future update gets pickier about third-party chips. I keep auto-updates off on this machine for exactly that reason, and I'd suggest you do the same.
Second, the build is cheaper and you can feel it. The plastic housing is lighter, the tape over the contacts was stuck on a little crooked, and the box it came in is the kind of flimsy you'd expect from a $20 part. None of that touches print quality — but if heft and packaging signal "quality" to you, this will feel like the budget option in your hand, because it is.
Third, and this is the one to actually plan around: yield ran a touch under the rating. It's sold as high-yield to match the XL, and it mostly does, but in my real-world use I got a little less life out of it before it ran dry than I did from the genuine XL. Not dramatically — but if you print heavy, buy a spare so you're not stranded mid-label the way I was. Which loops me right back to why a dead cartridge is more than an annoyance: it's never empty at a convenient time. It's empty when you're printing the return label before the carrier closes, or the permission slip due tomorrow morning. At half the price, keeping a backup in the drawer is finally affordable — and that, honestly, is the quiet win here.
Who should skip it
If you print professional color photography, or you run a business where a "non-genuine" warning flashing in front of a client would mortify you, or you simply won't turn off firmware auto-updates — buy the OEM 67XL and pay the $40. No shame in it. For those people the markup buys a kind of quiet you might genuinely want.
Me? I print labels and homework and the occasional boring document. The compatible 67XL drops sharp black text, perfectly usable color, clicks in like it belongs, and costs me about half. I clicked through one warning screen, turned off auto-update, and I've reordered it twice since. For roughly $20 doing the same job the $40 one does, I'd buy it again — and I have.
