hp 6500 (all-in-one) "General Printing Error (Ox610000f6)" displayed after first use!

[DexterM]

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helpihatemyhp wrote:

I have NO paper in my printer at all and the error coade 0x610000f6 keeps coming up.. HELP i'm about to toss this pos out the window.

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Jammed paper is not the only cause of a carriage jam. Follow the steps in the document I posted earlier to eliminate the other causes. If it still doesn't work, then call HP Tech Support.

[zlftcav]

Went to this website:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareCategory?swlinkmsg=200&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&product...

Dl'd the firmware upgrade, installed it and the printer did a reset, shut itself down and restarted, then printed a report. I then did a test page and everything seems to be working. I've thought that I had this probelm licked several times before and I won't know if this fixed it for sure until I have had several days of nonerror printing. I've tried every other suggestion so far and had things working for maybe 1 day before the problem raised it's ugly little head again. Maybe the firmware upgrade is just what it needed.

[zlftcav]

Spoke too soon. Firmware upgrade fixed the problem for about 6 pages worth of printing and then we went back to business as usual.

[zlftcav]

Well just got off the phone with HP. They are very sorry but it seems to be a harware problem, but there is good news, for $120 they will upgrade me to another machine with a 2 year warranty as there is no fix for this problem. What I have is a door stop.

[dbohnwagner]

As it is under warranty you should return it to the store and get it replaced. For those of you getting the error on an out of warranty printer, I have fixed this error several times by doing the following:

1. With the printer powered on, lift the output tray to access the print carriage (as if you were going to change a print cartridge), slide it all the way to the left then unplug the printer. (Do not power off the printer with the power button, it will seat the carriage in it's home location to the right and lock it in place)

2. Locate the plastic ribbon that the print carriage glides along. (it is a clear plastic ribbon with a darker stripe in the center. the stripe is actually a series of vertical sipes or lines that an optical eye in the print carriage uses to identify it's location on the platen. The error is often the result of a build up of excess ink on the ribbon making it unreadable, causing the print head to not know it's location.)

3. Use paper towels and rubbing alcohol to thoroughly clean the ribbon moving the print carriage left and right in order to get the entire ribbon. Keep cleaning, swapping out the paper towels until there is no more ink coming off on the towels. Be sure to get the entire ribbon, the part to the right can be hard to get because of the housing getting in the way. Keep in mind that the ribbon is plastic and can break if too much force is used.

4. After the ribbon is clean, close the printer and plug it back in and allow it to go through it's initialization cycle.

5.  I like to enter the toolbox (the wrench button) and run the print head cleaning cycle to clean and align the heads at this point.

6. This should resolve the issue, I have successfully done this 5 or 6 times on different printers without issue, once I had to go back in and do some additional cleaning. It sure beats replacing the printer.

[DexterM]

Good suggestion, dbohnwagner. Just want to emphasize point no. 3 there. Be *very* gentle with the plastic ribbon, aka the encoder strip.

[jpagano1]

Same problem - cannot believe it. 

**RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX**  - not one page prints so, no, I'm not going through a cleaning of the ribbon due to ink build up nonsense. I'm actually more upset with Staples for selling **junk** and then selling a "service plan" on my "junk".

I own an IT consulting firm and constantly recommend HP to my clients. This is the 2nd HP product in a week to fail within 24 hours of unpacking - the other being a Laserjet 2025. I think I'm finally done with HP.

I guess I'm still nostalgic for those old LaserJet 4 war horses that could print a million pages before needing service. Literally a million pages.

[Jann31]

Hi Marie14,

I've found some solutions to fix this error on this link:

http://fix-your-printer.blogspot.com/2011/02/error-0x61011beb-on-hp-officejet-and.html

Good luck !

[mokraut]

I also have the same problem, new printer right out of the box and it comes up with this error message.  Whats more frustrating, this is a replacement printer from HP because the the original Photosmart, which I had for about 11 months, became an obscure error message and all the tricks with unpluggig it and turning the power on with  * and 6 didn't work. For the original printer I fortunately had 7 days left on the warranty and HP kindly replaced the broken printer within a week with one that was broken from the start.  I cant belive it and there is no excuse for this.  No ink build up here since its brand new. Rebooting a Windows computer can solve many problems, but the same approach with HP printers just doesn't cut it.  

Sorry Dexter, HP sucks in Germany(my location) too. Perhabs you could release that "internal document" with what the printer errors mean.  Perhaps that would help to stop the alienation of loyal HP customers.  I will also refuse to buy HP printers in the future.

[thefixer77]

Gee Maybe you could use some common sense and contact the support line