Clean print head

[jwelz]

After several months of not getting an answer of whether my OfficeJet 8710 is supported in Windows 10 or whether I could get my Deskjet 460 working in Windows 10, I completely gave up for the time being.  Tired of out sourcing all my printing, I pulled out my old OfficeJet 7500A.  Fortunately there is a driver for that which appears a though it might work.  The 3 colors print fine but, although there is plenty of black ink, there is almost no ink going through to the paper.

I opened the OfficeJet app installed on my computer and it opened something entitled HP Officejet 7500 E910: HP Printer Assistant.  I seached for the term 'clean' and found an option 'Clean the printhead'.  I clicked on that and a pop up entitled 'HP Officejet 7500A (E910) User Guide' opened to an item entitled 'Clean the printhead'.  The instructions are:

To clean the printhead from the control panel

1. Load letter, A4, or legal unused plain white paper into the main input tray.

2. Touch right arrow , and then select Setup.

3. Touch Tools, and then select Clean Printhead.

Where is this 'Control Panel'?  Is it some HP utility.  Why is there no such item on the Printer assistant app?  Why is it not listed under the app menu item heading 'Utilities'?  Why is working with HP always such a guessing game?

[8lives]

Take a look at page 10 in the user's guide for the location of the control panel.

[jwelz]

I've typed in Page 10 as a search term in the User Guide and the following hits as shown in the screen shot are displayed.  None of them appear to have anything to do with a control panel.  There doesn't appear to be any way to navigate to page 10 in the User Guide.

I'd just like to run a cleaning cycle for the black ink as the app says the print head health is good and there is plenty of ink.  When I print anything with black, it simply doesn't appear on the paper.

[8lives]

The user's guide that is online can be found here.

The control panel is found on the front of the 7500A.

Also take a look at this link.

[jwelz]

Thank you for the useful links.  I may need to do the water soak print head cleaning posted in your 2nd link.  I don't understand why HP deliberately confounds users by naming two separate things 'User Guide' as well as use the term 'Control Panel' when they mean the LCD interface on the printer.

I have printed the diagnostic page a few times and all I get is the line with ink levels listed and 4 scattered partial lines with black and about 1% ink fill in those.  None of the other color appears.  When I try the head calibration, it spits out page with some cyan and nothing else and then a message appears on the LCD panel advising that 'calibration failed'.  I've tried the software head cleaning and get a sheet with 6 colored rectangles near the top of the page and nothing else.  I tried the 2nd phase head cleaning and no improvement.  It seems that the Yellow, Magenta and Cyan colors and mixes of them are working well but nothing is coming from the black.  Ink levels are over 75% in the colors and 85% in the black.  I switched out the black for a new HP cartridge and get the exact same results.  When I print a page of black text, nothing appears on the paper unless I change the printer settings to use maximum quality.  In that case I get a pale blue grey print out of the text.  When I tried drawing some thick black lines in MS Paint, the print showed nothing until I set it to maximum quality.  The output was the same pale blue except there was a black outline to the perimeter of the lines which I suspect was made up of a mix of the 3 colors.

Now I need to consider why the print head alignment failed and whether soaking the head as per your 2nd link may help.

[jwelz]

Don't you just love when you spent 20 minutes writing a reply and the forum software pukes it out.  HP just keeps right on giving me the finger.  You can see I'm logged in at the top right of the screen shot.  It also says I have 1 mail and 3 notifications.  It says this every day I use this forum and the number of notifications and mails just don't go away no matter how often I click on them to check.

[8lives]

Soaking the printhead may not solve the blocked inkjets if the printer has been sitting for a long time.