Is XL Ink Actually Worth It? Standard vs XL Cartridges, With Real Numbers

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Standing in front of the shelf, the standard cartridge is the cheaper thing to pick up. That is usually the more expensive decision. XL cartridges cost more at the till and less per page, and for most households the gap is not close. Here is the arithmetic, using HP 67 and 67XL as the worked example, plus the one case where the standard cartridge genuinely wins.

The whole comparison in about a minute, above.

The Short Answer

If you print at least weekly, buy XL. The extra ink is close to double, the extra price is nowhere near double, and your cost per page drops sharply. If you print a handful of pages a month, buy standard — not to save money on the purchase, but because ink you do not use in time is ink you throw away.

What "XL" Actually Means

An XL cartridge is the same physical cartridge as its standard sibling, filled with more ink. Same shell, same chip family, same printers. HP 67 and 67XL both fit the DeskJet 2700 series, ENVY 6000 series and DeskJet Plus 4100 series; there is no compatibility question to answer and no setting to change. The printer simply reports a fuller tank.

The Numbers: HP 67 vs 67XL

That is the whole trick. The ink roughly doubles while the price rises by a fraction of that, so cost per page falls. A remanufactured 67XL black from Castle Ink works out under fourteen cents a page — and you are swapping cartridges half as often, which has a value of its own on a printer that runs a cleaning cycle every time you install one.

Want to run the sum for your own model rather than ours? Our printer ink cost calculator does it from your page count, and the Printer Ink Price Index publishes what genuine cartridges actually cost per page across a basket of popular models.

Rated Pages Are Not Your Pages

Those page counts come from ISO/IEC test documents that cover roughly 5% of the sheet with ink — a business letter, not a photo. Print dense text, graphics or photographs and real-world yield lands 30–50% below the number on the box. That does not change the comparison, because both cartridges are measured the same way; it just means you should treat 240 as a ceiling rather than a promise. There is more on this in How Long Do Printer Ink Cartridges Last?

The One Case Where Standard Wins

If you print a handful of pages a month, XL is the wrong buy. Ink in an installed cartridge dries at the print head over time whether you use it or not, and an inkjet that sits idle burns ink on cleaning cycles trying to clear itself. Buying twice as much ink to throw half of it away is not a saving. Light, occasional printers should buy standard cartridges and store spares sealed, upright and somewhere cool.

Rule of Thumb

• Print weekly or more: buy XL, every time.
• Print a few times a year: buy standard, and keep spares sealed.
• Print a lot of colour every week: look past cartridges entirely at an ink tank model — see Inkjet vs. Laser Printer in 2026.

Where to Buy XL Without Paying OEM Prices

The saving compounds if you buy the XL as a compatible or remanufactured cartridge rather than an original. Castle Ink stocks high-yield XL cartridges for most major printers, remanufactured in the USA, typically 30–70% below OEM, with free U.S. shipping over $50. Find yours by model in our find ink by printer directory.

You can also shop XL ink cartridges on Amazon.

And if the underlying question is really why any of this costs what it does, that is its own story: Why Is Printer Ink So Expensive? (And How to Spend Less).