A blank, my lord.

April 26, 2009 12:22 PM

My inkjet printer behaves as if it is printing, but produces nothing - I'd be grateful for advice.

Canon SmartBase 360. It feeds paper through and the printhead moves as usual, but nothing prints - neither colour or black and white, text or graphics. The printer was ok until a few days ago.

I have tried - turning the printer on and off; turning the pc on and off; deleting and re-installing the printer; upgrading the driver; replacing the cartridges; cleaning the sections I can get to.

Is there anything else I can try? I was planning to get a new printer fairly soon anyway, but would like to resuscitate this one to get through a stack of cartridges. And if anyone can recommend a good laser printer that would also be useful. Thank you.

posted by paduasoy to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This happened to me on a Canon i6500. First of all it wouldn't print black, so I had to create text documents in interesting shades of blue/red/purple for a while, but then the other colours stopped printing too. It would still go through the motions of doing stuff, but the resulting documents were 100% ink-free. I believe it was the print head that had reached the end of its natural life, but given that a new printer was only marginally more expensive than a new print head, I didn't want to take the chance that it wasn't the print head.
posted by Beautiful Screaming Lady at 12:29 PM on April 26, 2009

Best answer: I had an old Epson wide format printer that sat around for 4 years before it was turned back on. It also didn't print anything, even with a new cartridge. The trick I used was to force it to print on a piece of paper that had been soaked with Windex or alcohol (can't remember which, please check before attempting). That restored the heads and fixed it brilliantly. I found out about it from the http://www.fixyourownprinter.com/ forum. You may want to search in there.
posted by crapmatic at 12:33 PM on April 26, 2009

This happened to me with a Canon MX700. Turned out I had installed the driver but not the printer software. After feeling extremely stupid, a simple download fixed the problem.
posted by nax at 2:57 PM on April 26, 2009

Is this the kind of printer that has separate printheads? Perhaps they've failed. Or the connector between the printhead and the logic of the machine has come undone.
posted by gjc at 4:45 PM on April 26, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks for everyone's comments. I cleaned the printhead as crapmatic suggested, following instructions from fixyourownprinter, but no luck. Someone looked at it for me and thinks the rollers are out of alignment with the printhead - looks like ink's feeding through but not getting as far as the paper.

So shall shortly be asking a new question about laser printers - thanks all.
posted by paduasoy at 2:23 PM on May 4, 2009