Officejet 8600 printing black instead of colour (yellow)

[dialallama]

I recently installed a new black ink cartridge in my very new printer (the cartridges that come with the printer have a pittiful amount of ink in them). I then tried to print a photo on to glossy paper but the image kept coming out very very dark but otherwise good quality. As the printer is very new I haven't printed photos before but hadn't had any problems with coloured documents. I tried changing what few settings were available, tried different software and even booted up the old windows vista to check it wasn't a linux problem. Nothing seemed to make any difference. When I made the photo lighter in the software package it still came out really dark but more washed out. I finally tried to print a test page and was supprised to see the attached result.

The colour wheel is really banded and appears to have a particular problem of printing black over yellow. I ran the head cleaning software several time to no effect and even took out the head and manually cleaned it. Still no improvement.

A little more experimenting showed that printing a pure cyan square was fine, printing a magenta square was slightly banded but printing a yellow square came out a banded dark grey.

What the heck is happening? Why is the printer spewing out black ink when instructed to print yellow?

I have replaced all the cartridges over its short life and as im not a heavy user it is hard to be sure when the problem started. I replaced the yellow first from amazon (shows as genuine HP) then the cyan and blue from the local print shop (non-hp) . The black was replaced most recently.

As this is a rather bizarre behaviour, I am not sure what to try next. I have already wasted lots of time, ink and paper on this problem and don't want to waste money on buying new stuff unless I know it will work.

Any help appreciated!

[dialallama]

Looking on the forum there have been at least 4 reports of the same problems (all with yellow printing as black). Unfortunately no one has posted a solution.

What could possibly be causing this problem? What controls the pumping of ink? The head or the cartridge? Or could it be a hardware or software fault?

[dialallama]

No replies yet. Anyone got any ideas?

[Cbert]

Hello @dialallama!

Thanks for posting on the HP Forums!

I should be able to provide some suggestions that may resolve the issue!  When printing on glossy photo paper you must ensure that you choose glossy photo paper in the print settings before you hit print.  This will ensure the printer distributes the correct amount of ink for the correct type of paper.  This may be a reason for why the photos are printing too dark.

You mentioned you have performed the printhead cleaning many times and even removed the printhead to clean it manually. When the printhead cleaning is complete does the report printed also come out with poor quality or a mix of yellow and black?  

If you perform a print report from the front panel of the printer and it has poor quality then you are likely looking at a cartridge/printhead or hardware issue within the printer.  If the quality is fine then its likely a software issue from the computer.

The first thing recommended when troubleshooting any hardware issues within the printer is to ensure the printer is getting full power. The printer is recommended to be plugged into the wall outlet directly and not a power surge protector especially for troubleshooting.  This can be a temporary connection but is a good way to ensure power is not a factor. 

I have located a document regarding Fixing Print Quality Problems for the HP Officejet Pro 8600 e-All-in-One Printer Series.  This document may already go over some of the steps you have already tried.  If you are still experiencing the issue I would recommend contacting our phone support regarding warranty and possible printhead replacement.

Please call our technical support at 1-800-474-6836. If you live outside the US/Canada Region, please click the link below to get the support number for your region. http://www8.hp.com/us/en/contact-hp/ww-phone-assist.html

Let me know how it goes and thanks again for posting on the HP Forums!

[SamCorl]

This happened to me when I installed a high-capacity black cartridge.  The printer worked fine for years, then suddenly prints black where yellow should be.  I replaced the high-capacity cartridge (950XL - CN045A) with a standard capacity cartridge and the printer worked properly.  I printed several pages of yellow text to flush the black out of the print head, and it works fine now.