Printhead cleaning / replacement on Officejet Pro 8610

[Mitcheto]

Hi,

Does anyone have any advice on cleaning the printhead of an Officejet Pro 8610, above and beyond the built-in 'Clean Printhead' function? The reason I ask is this...

I bought the printer about a year ago and it's been absolutely fine until I decided to use non-oem ink about a month ago. My reasons for going down this route were:

1) I'm not a heavy user of the printer

2) I don't often print or need high quaility photo prints

3) The particular non-oem cartridges I purchased had numerour (over 100) very positive reviews

4) £22 for a full set vs HP's price of £65

5) I've used non-oem cartridges for years on my old Canon printer without any issues.

Unfortunately for me, although the magenta and yellow non-oem cartridges were absolutely fine, the cyan caused missing lines to be printed (between 50-80% missing). I've tried the 'Clean Printhead' function about 20 odd times, but it's not made any difference. I've also removed the printhead and blotted paper against the it, but it's made no difference. Incidentaly, the black cartridge is still the original HP setup one.

I've now had a refund on the non-oem cartridges and purchased a set of original HP inks, however, despite further cleaning, the cyan is still not printing correctly. 

I appreciate that using non-oem inks invalidates any warranty (although I'd like to challenge HP on this policy!). I can't believe that a non-oem cartridge is that likely to cause a serious problem with the printhead... after all, it's just ink?!

So... any advice on how to proceed with cleaning the printhead would be welcomed. Or better still, if anyone can tell me a way of HP agreeing to service the printer in it's current state would be good. Otherwise, I'm left with the option of purchasing a new printhead (which seems to be very expensive and hard to obtain), or purchasing a new printer (probably cheaper than a new printhead).

Thanks

Tony

[Bob_Headrick]

You may be able to recover by removing the ink cartridges, then removing the printhead and soaking it in hot distilled water as described in the post here. That post was written for a different printhead model, but the basic procedure would be the same.

I cannot imagine any circumstances where HP would agree to repair damage caused by third party ink.  You might go after the supplier and ask them to repair the damage caused by their product. "After all, its just ink" is a not correct - there is a lot of chemistry behind ink formulations. The video here has some information: