HP 62 Black cartridge review: is it worth it for Envy and OfficeJet
HP 62 Black is a genuine, factory-made cartridge — not one of those "compatible" wildcards off a marketplace listing — and that's exactly why it costs what a cartridge costs, not what a bottle of ink costs. If your printer is an Envy or OfficeJet from the list below, buy it without a second thought; you'll get a couple hundred pages of office text out of it. If you print rarely and your printer sits idle for months at a stretch, look at an inkjet with a continuous ink system or a laser printer instead — this little bottle of ink will dry out long before you use it up.
A printer that stays silent for three weeks and then throws "cartridge incompatible or damaged" the moment you need to print a form for daycare — that's probably the single most reliable way to ruin your morning. Every Envy or OfficeJet owner knows the scene by heart. And here the choice is genuinely simple: either the genuine cartridge, or a gamble on some no-name alternative that sometimes works flawlessly and sometimes smears the cartridge dock so badly you end up carrying the printer to a repair shop.
HP 62 Black is exactly that "genuine" option. Compatibility here isn't just a token pairing with one or two models — it works with the Envy 5540, 5640, 5660, 7640, and the OfficeJet 5740 and 8040. So if you own any of these printers, there's not much point shopping around: HP deliberately locked this cartridge series to a specific lineup, and trying to outsmart the chip with a third-party version usually ends with an error message right in the middle of printing something you actually needed.
How it behaves in real life
Let's be blunt: this is a black cartridge, a workhorse, not a photo-quality showpiece. Text comes out crisp, no grey cast — something cheap alternatives often produce — and letters stay sharp even on plain 80 gsm office paper, not glossy stock. For invoices, contracts, school essays, it's exactly what you need. The printer runs steadily with it, no streaking or dropout lines, the kind that creep in when nozzles clog from sitting unused too long.
And here's the catch nobody mentions on marketplace listing pages. HP deliberately ships these cartridges at less-than-generous capacity — a marketing choice that's annoying, but you learn to live with it. The ink lasts roughly a month of regular office printing, not a year sitting in a drawer "just in case." If you're the type who prints a utility bill once a quarter, the ink will simply dry out before your next print job, and you'll be staring at that same incompatibility error — except this time with a genuine cartridge instead of a bootleg one. Frustrating, but that's how inkjet technology works, and HP is no worse here than Canon or Epson; it's a shared curse of every ink-tank printer.
Stacked against a Canon PG-540 or an Epson 603, the HP 62 isn't cheaper or pricier — it sits in the same middle ground as any other genuine cartridge. The real difference is ecosystem lock-in: if the printer is already an HP, put HP ink in it, because the chip will just work without any workarounds. The temptation to grab a cheaper compatible cartridge from an online marketplace is always there, and honestly, sometimes it pays off. But with the Envy and OfficeJet lines specifically, the risk of a "cartridge not recognized" error is higher than with simpler models, because HP guards the chip more aggressively here.
Who should buy it, and who shouldn't
Buy it if you own one of the printers listed above and print regularly — at least once a week. Then the cartridge burns through its full yield instead of drying out early, and the whole "printer won't detect the ink" headache just disappears from your life.
Skip it if your printer sits untouched for months and only gets fired up for one document twice a year. In that case a genuine cartridge isn't a solution, it's a recurring way to throw money at dried-up ink. Here it's more honest to look at printers with a continuous ink supply system, or go fully laser for black-and-white printing — pricier upfront, but you escape the "buy it, it dries out, buy it again" loop entirely.
We won't quote a single price here, since it swings a lot by market — check dede.sh for the full landed cost to your country: item price, forwarding, and import duty rolled into one number. But the math is worth doing before you buy: if you print a lot, it may genuinely be cheaper to get a printer with a continuous ink system from the start rather than keep feeding it cartridges. That said, if you already own an Envy or OfficeJet and the real question is "genuine or risky knockoff," genuine wins every time — if only because you won't be googling error codes at one in the morning.
FAQ
No, and don't even try. HP locks its cartridge series to specific models through the chip, so for other Envy or DeskJet printers you need to find their own designation — 65, 67, 302, and so on. Get it wrong and the cartridge either won't physically install or the printer will throw an error.
For Envy and OfficeJet — yes, it is. These models are especially picky about chips, and compatible cartridges clash with the firmware far more often here than on simpler printers. You save a dollar or two and risk ruining your morning, or in the worst case, the cartridge dock itself.
If your printer officially accepts only one of them, the question answers itself, since the other simply won't install. If your model happens to sit at the crossroads of both lines (rare, but it happens), go by how much you actually print: the two cartridges are close enough in yield and price that the difference barely matters.
For the occasional photo, sure, it handles text and graphics decently. But this is a black-only cartridge — there's no color here — so for regular photo printing you'll need a color HP 62 alongside it.
