DeskJet F4280 Orange Blinking Light and "E" in display; refuses to print

[denversc]

I have an HP DeskJet F4280 all-in-one printer.  It has been working well for the past few years.  Today I went to print something and the printer did not respond at all.  I have printed many times before from this computer and it has always worked fine.  There are several computers in my house that use this printer, running Windows 7 64-bit and Ubuntu Linux and all have historically worked fine.

On the printer's control panel, there is an orange light under the ink level for the black cartridge that is blinking.  Also, there is an "E" in the number display (photo below).  From reading the support forums I managed to get it to print some sort of test page with these errors listed:

• 1 pen in chute 1 is unsupported type
• 1 pen in chute 1 has illegal region set
• 1 pen in chute 1 has bad lockout bits

I have attached a scan of this full page below.

The ink cartridge is a genuine HP 60 XL cartridge.  The cartridge has been refilled once at a mall "ink refill" location.  It has been working fine since being refilled, until today.  Somehow I managed to print one page of a print job that I queued and it looked fine.  So there is definitely nothing wrong with the cartridge.

I tried replacing the black ink cartridge with an old, empty cartridge that I had lying around the house.  This fixed the error reported on the printer's control panel.  Since the cartridge is empty, when it tried to print something the page still came out blank, but at least the orange light stopped blinking.  When I put the problematic cartridge back in the printer it started reporting the error again, with the blinking orange light and the "E" in the display.

How can I fix my printer to accept this black ink cartridge?  I very much do not want to go out and blow $60 on a new cartridge when the one that I have is totally fine.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[natsemioldskul]

I have exactly the same printer, F4280, with exactly the same errors:  blinking orange light, "E" in display. I have

also spent a considerable amount of time with HP tech support to no avail.  Anybody have a fix?

[Gordon_H · Accepted solution]

Hi denversc and natsemioldskul,

The blinking light under the black ink indicator means there is no ink being detected from the cartridge. This either means the cartridge is empty OR has gone bad. The "E" error means the printer is detecting something wrong with one of the cartridges.

http://goo.gl/2lQQS

In denversc's case, since putting in an old empty black ink cartridge removed the "E" error, the problem is with the cartridge. Using a refilled cartridge may or may not have caused the issue. Check out the following link for information regarding this:

http://goo.gl/vJhvk

[natsemioldskul]

Thanks, pulled a known-good black cartridge out of an identical model. worked fine in the printer in question, the factory HP cartridge I just installed was the culprit.  Appreciate the quick response!

[csibrown1488]

My XL cartridge is brand new and is throwing the same error code. I no longer have a receipt and I'm pretty sure that the store will not accept this return or give me store credit. I paid way too much money for this nonsense.

[karen5506]

we have  changed 3 different cartarges and still is blinking