Hi! Canon ip4000 not printing...

[itsallgood]

ghwellsjr -- thanks so much for your reply.

Yes, everything you say is true...

*** All colours work fine. Including the small black for photos.
*** If i set the paper to Matt Photo Paper -- the text and colours work! (Which i didnt know until i tried it because of your post ;-) )

So all the dye inks to work (the thinner cartridges), and the fat black cartridge only works on matt photo paper?

Is there anything i can do?

Thanks again for this help!

 

[pebe]

I believe the 'fat' black cartridge only prints when the media is set to 'Plain Paper'.

 

[ghwellsjr]

As pebe pointed out, the fat pigment black cartridge is not used when you specify matte or any other photo quality paper. When you specify matte, it uses the thin dye black cartridge. So now we know that all the dye inks work and the pigment black does not work. This means that the problem is not caused by the ink pooling on the bottom of the print head and preventing ink from the nozzles from getting on the paper.

Now to get your pigment black working: First we want to make sure the problem is not in the 3eBK cartridge. Take the cartridge out of the printer and blow on the air vent at the top of the cartridge and see if ink comes out of the outlet port at the bottom of the cartridge. Of course you want to have some paper towels or something to collect the messy ink. If this works continue on to the next step. If it doesn't work, maybe it's because you forgot to remove the tape that covers the air vent. That would be an easy fix. Otherwise, find a cartridge that you know will pass ink.

The next step is to make sure the printer can do what you did by blowing through the air vent. Actually the printer does the same thing by sucking on the outlet port (through the print head of course). It does this with the purge units where the print head parks. There are actually two purge units on the right side of the printer, one for the four dye ink cartridges and one for the pigment black cartridge. I'm guessing you did a good job of cleaning the dye ink purge unit but not the pigment ink purge unit. It's hard to see. It's located just to the left of the dye ink purge unit. If you already did this on the dye ink purge unit then you probably know how to do it on the pigment purge unit but just in case follow this process:

Remove the 3eBK cartridge.
Put some Windex on the screen where the cartridge sits in the print head.
Put some Windex on the pigment purge unit.
Put the 3eBK cartridge back in the printer and close the cover.
From your computer, tell the printer to do a cleaning on just the black 3eBK nozzles.
Do a nozzle check.
Repeat all of these steps until all the nozzles are printing or until you give up.
If you give up, let the printer sit overnight and try again the next day.

Good luck and let us know what happens.

 

[itsallgood]

I've given up on it.

There is nothing left to try -- and its cost me almost the same as a new one would.

Cheers anyway guys.

 

[Ron350]

Well thats not good hope you can sell it for parts.