The high capacity ink cartridge for heavy black/white printing (HP 363 Large)

Member Name: jamesontheroad

Product:	HP 363 Large
Date:	21/01/09 (444 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Double the ink, less than double the price

Disadvantages: Not included in the multipack of 363 inks

Posted elsewhere on DooYoo is my review for the HP Photosmart 3210 All-in-one printer. We inherited this beast of a machine (and it is a beast, it's an ugly one to boot that occupies a big corner of my desk) from a family member so my only experience of running costs associated with this printer has been with the HP 363 range of inks.

As everyone with a modern computer printer knows, the relationship between your printer and its ink is of great importance. When buying a printer, you want to know how many pages you expect to get from a cartridge and you want to know how much they cost to replace. HP are pulling a canny trick in this case, selling two kinds of black ink cartridge in the 363 series (which fits a variety of related printers). The ink is the same, the cartridge housing it is the same, but the HP 363 comes in two tank sizes: regular and XL. This XL or Large cartridge contains about 17ml of black ink, which is supposedly enough for twice the number of mono pages that you can get from a regular 363 black cartridge.

All this is academic, of course, because there is no such things as a standard black and white page. You and I will consume vastly different quantities of ink in our printers because we print different things, at different quality settings, and with different quantities of bold or underlined text. Once you start printing mono images things get even more complicated. Like the advertised fuel consumption of a car, page outputs (HP suggest as many as 1100 from the XL cartridge) are only useful when comparing like for like products.

So ultimately, my advice is simple. If you own an HP printer that requires ink from the 363 range of cartridges, you will almost certainly find that the XL / Large black ink cartridge offers you better value, since it can produce approximately twice as many pages as the standard cartridge. Prices are not unreasonable, in the region of £10 for the XL from various online retailers. Installation is a doddle, although I have had no success trying to save money by refilling these cartridges: they're microchipped and don't seem to be easily refilled and reprogrammed to work a second time. You can order freepost recycling envelopes from hp.com if you are conscious of waste output: better than ordinary recycling programmes, this will actually take the cartridge back to HP for cleaning and re-use.

When buying multipacks of HP 363 ink (there are two multipacks available, one with all the colours and one with all the colours and "free" 6x4 photo paper) beware that the black ink cartridge enclosed is not an XL format. If you do a lot of mono printing, the multipacks offer value for replacing your colours but not the black ink.

Summary: The best option for those who mainly print b/w on their HP 363 compatible printers

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