Designed for parents, teachers, and small business owners, the HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge handles the colour work a home printer faces every week. Think CBC project covers for a Grade 6 learner, pie charts in a monthly sales report, or property flyers for an agent working Kilimani and Lavington. Dye ink soaks into plain paper and spreads evenly, so large coloured areas look smooth rather than grainy on ordinary 80gsm office paper. When logos print with the wrong shade or a colour band goes missing, a fresh HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge restores all three channels at once.

Where most Nairobi electronics shops keep a loose pile of unboxed cartridges, Mascom International sells every unit inside HP's sealed carton with the security label untouched. Buyers throughout Kenya tell us that refilled colour cartridges tend to mix shades after a few weeks, turning greens muddy and reds orange. The HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge prints through a brand-new print head, so each colour lands where it should. Pay by M-Pesa at the counter, or order on WhatsApp and pay when the HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge arrives at your door.

It prints every colour element on the page, from coloured text to charts, logos, and photos. The single cartridge holds cyan, magenta, and yellow in three separate chambers, and the printer blends them into thousands of shades. Pure black text comes from the separate black cartridge. When you print a colour photo, both cartridges often fire together, with the black adding depth to shadows. Printing a full-page picture uses far more ink than a page of coloured headings, so yield depends heavily on content.

HP rates the HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge at about 200 pages under the ISO/IEC 24711 method. Those test pages mix text, coloured graphics, and blocks of colour rather than full photos. A family printing 10 school assignments a week with a few coloured images would typically get four to five months. Full-bleed photos on plain paper can drop that number sharply, sometimes below 50 pages. For heavy photo work, a local photo studio may cost less per print than any home inkjet.

Usually one chamber is running dry before the other two. The cartridge holds three separate colour reservoirs, and a document heavy in blue, such as a corporate template, drains cyan faster than magenta or yellow. Once one chamber empties, the whole cartridge needs replacing, because the three colours share one body. Run the printer's cleaning cycle once first. If the missing colour does not return after one cleaning, the chamber is empty or its nozzles have dried, and a new cartridge is the fix.

It handles casual photos well on HP photo paper, but it is built mainly for documents with colour content. The print head uses drop sizes of 6.3 and 2.8 picolitres, and the smaller drops help render skin tones and gradients more smoothly. Dye ink produces richer colour on glossy paper than pigment ink does. For passport-sized prints or a few snapshots for a school project, results are good. For framed prints or large runs of event photos, a dedicated photo printer suits the job better.

At KSh 2,900 for about 200 pages, each colour page costs around KSh 14.50. Pages with a small logo or a coloured heading cost far less, since they use only a fraction of the ink HP's test pages do. A small office printing 40 colour invoices a month would spend under KSh 600 in colour ink monthly. Selecting grayscale for internal drafts stops the printer drawing on colour ink at all, stretching each cartridge across more weeks.

Not reliably. A refill reuses a print head that has already fired thousands of times, and colour nozzles clog faster than black ones because dye ink dries quickly in the chambers. Refill vendors also struggle to keep the three colours from bleeding into each other through the sponge. Many HP printers flag refilled chips as used, hiding the ink gauge. The HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge from Mascom International comes sealed with a fresh head, a working chip, and HP's own defect coverage.

Keep it sealed in its carton at room temperature until the day you need it. HP rates sealed storage from -40 to 60°C and 5 to 100% relative humidity, so a Nairobi office drawer or a Kisumu shop shelf both work. Avoid leaving it in a parked car under midday sun. After opening, install it within a few minutes, because exposed nozzles start drying quickly. Check the install-by date on the carton and use older stock first when you keep several spares.

Choose the correct paper type in the print dialogue before every job. Setting plain paper when printing on glossy stock, or the reverse, causes smudging or washed-out colour. Use Best quality for photos and Normal for charts and reports. Run the printer's alignment routine after installing a new HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge so colour and black line up. If colours still look off, print the printer's quality report page, which shows each colour block and highlights any missing nozzles.

Three ways to order:

The HP 653 Tri-color Ink Cartridge comes with the 6-month Mascom warranty stated above.

Mascom International has built its reputation on sealed genuine consumables, current Kenyan pricing, and direct after-sales help from a store you can visit in person.