print cartridge problem black officejet 4500

[leebirnbaum]

OK folks, here's all my tricks I figured out to fool the printer into printing inspite of it's urge to stop and display "Printer Cartridge Error", or a false "low ink", etc.

My situation: I had a number of empty genuine HP, or generic (staples/office depot, etc., cartridges that I figured I'd save money on by bringing them to COstco to refill.

This resulted in some working for a while, and others not working at all, providing mainly "Printer Cartridge Error".

Here are the tricks I found to sort of work around the error and get it to print:

1st, I noticed that more often than not, the error occurs right after the printer somehow detects a printinging problem.

In all of my cases, the print problem that occurred immediately prior to the life stopping error was random black blocks being printed instead of text.

If you catch this, and hit "cancel" before the pronter catches it, you are ok to simply reprint that page, and continue, watching, and being prepared to hit cancel again it it starts missprinting again...

However, if you did not catch it, and the printer flags the error, then it seems to mark that cartridge ID as bad.

So even if you remove it and reinsert it, it will still know it's bad.

The good news is that the printer appears to only remember the last cartridge inserted.

So by inserting another cartridge (such as another previously bad one in my case), it's usually open to assume it's a good cartridge, and proceeds to the alignment step.

This is the trick step that you have to properly handle.

If ypou do the alignment, at least imn my case, the alignment ccalls for enough detailed printing that it catches that the cartridge somehow isn't perfect, and flags it as bad again.

So...  what you do is hit "OK" to begin the alignment, and then immediately hit the cancel btton, and follow any prompts to confirm that you really want to cancel the alignment.

After that, the cartridge will work normally, error free... until again, it missprints (black blocks in my case), and if the printer catches the missprints, the error is again flagged, and you must swap cartridges (again, can be to another previously bad one), and follow my steps.

Note that you can also just ignore the alignment request and print.

However, I do not recommend that because the continuous alignment reuest gets in the way.

For example, sometimes, it interferes with the print queue knowing the print is comlete and cleaning itself out (which can prevent additional printing), and the copy function - you load originals, but if you hit "start" it tries to do the alignment, instead of the desired copy.

So again, to get around this, simply hit "OK to perform the alignment, and then immediately hit "cancel" before it actually prints the alignment page and choaks.

My work arounds are not ideal, but they do work, and thanks to them, I am able to use up all my "bad" refilled cartridges.

That said, I'll probably go buy some new, authentic HP ones after these are done, then attempt to keep refilling them until they start to exhibit these issues again, at which time, I'll use my techniques to use them up and not waste the refills, then again, buy new good ones, and so on... until the printer itself croaks, hopefully righ before a black friday sale !    LOL

Hope this helps...

[Duane_D]

Hi! Thank you for that helpful post. Im sure this will help others n their matters. 

However, I have closed this thread to help keep the comments timely. If you have more to add, please start a new thread. Click here if you want to learn more about how to start a new conversation/thread.

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