Black ink on printer problem

miss choc

I have a HP Office jet 4620 the colour ink prints but not the black, the cartridges are all fine I ran a printerhead check and even manually cleaned the heads with water I had to use a damp cottonbud as I couldnt remove the cartridge basket. The black still doesnt work I checked with a printer shop earlier who told me it's printerheads and they will clean for a tenner. Dont want to fork out a tenner if they are just gonna do exactly what I did. Wonder if there is anything else I can do?

PeterTheEighth

No, that sounds right to me. And tbh cleaning it for a tenner is not bad. It's a messy job to clean those things. It involves (well, on the Epson printers that I've cleaned) pushing hot water through the printhead with a syringe. That's easy enough but getting at it can be difficult.

The real question of course is - Is it worth while putting any money in to an old printer given that you can get a new printer (with cartridges) for so little money?

miss choc

It's fairly new well about 3/4 years if that is newish in printer terms. I think maybe what happens is it must have inground ink that a cotton bud in water wont fix I had over a year ago left it open overnight with cartridges out as I was getting them next day so maybe the ink dried out funny only on black though. He said today that you also need to be doing a print at least once a week to keep it going which I dont I only use it for printing off the odd thing maybe twice a month learn something all the time.

PeterTheEighth

miss choc wrote: »

He said today that you also need to be doing a print at least once a week to keep it going which I dont I only use it for printing off the odd thing maybe twice a month learn something all the time.

Yep he's right on that as well. I used to do work for one guy, who'd call me every couple of months saying that the printer wouldnt print. He had the printer upstairs in his house baking in the sun, and would print only once every other week and the same thing happened. Same with a lot of schools. They HAD to have colour printers (inkjet) cos the kids wanted to print in colour. Then they would come back after the summer holidays and none of the printers work.

I've always liked monochrome laserjets, but most people just say "I have to print in colour". But with colour printers you have the maintenance of four cartridges / print heads / ink levels. And one thing that really annoys me about Epson and other printers is that if you have a full black ink cartridge, the printer wont print in black unless all of the cartridges have ink. It's like some print cartridge union, that they all down tools unless they all have some ink, and that's EVEN when you tell the printer to print with black ink only!!!

miss choc

Lol yeah all cartridges fine ink in them did the print head run and manually cleaned them (cant physically take it out to clean) but used damp cotton buds Colour fine except for bloody black print if the head look physically clean it must be something else I think I have to take it in :mad: