HP Photosmart “All-in-one” Scanning Error Fix

Yesterday Lavie gave me an assignment.  I had to scan an old photo of her late maternal grandmother in younger times from an antique “charm-tree” and then resize/trim it to fit in a tiny locket.

We have an HP Photosmart C6280 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier (inkjet) that has held up quite well over the years.

So after delicately removing the original photo from the tiny frame, I placed it on the scanner, used the front-panel and menu-controls to set the scan details and tell it to scan to my laptop (listed).

However, on my laptop screen, there was the following error message:

“LCD list needs to be upgraded”

Went though the steps again and same error message.

Eventually I got it fixed. For posterity, here’s what was done and learned in the process.

Before we go any further, the “LCD list” that we are being notified about is the list displayed on the tiny LCD information/menu panel of the printer itself. On our model it flips up and down to adjust the viewing angle. From this LCD list, you can select different networked computers you want to send the scan to, and in what format you want the sent-scan to take place. I only mention it as the message may not be clear to some, especially if this LCD seems to be working and listing items as normal for selection.

There are at least two (I found a third) ways to directly start a scan. You can initiate the scan from the “HP Solutions Center” application from your Windows system if you installed the full software set. That’s normally how I do it as you get a lot more bells-and-whistles to refine your scan/quality this way.

You can also place an item to be scanned on the glass scanning bed and hit a button on the device’s front panel, and then use the LCD list to select which computer on your network should receive the scan. That’s normally how the girls do it.

Finally, there is another method which I will get to in a bit.

Note, depending on what software applications you have, they also may be able to initiate a scan. A number of my graphic image editing tools can also communicate with the scanner to grab/import a scan directly. But we are trying to keep it simple here so I’m not exploring that as an option. Keep it in mind however.

All my connections were good, the device was clearly communicating on our home network and bi-directional functionality seemed to work.

I power-cycled the printer unit and tried again. Same error.

I pulled the plug on the printer and tried again. Same error.

I ran the “HP Update” utility in my installed HP program folder. It did find one update that had something to do with fonts I think…installed it. Tried again. Same error.

I did some quick research on the web and got a lot of tips, but this first one got me productive immediately as a work-around. (Windows 7 system but concept should work on any Windows system with some minor tweakage.) This is the “third” method I referred to earlier.

1. Open up the “Network” window
2. Find your HP printer in the list.
3. Double click it.
4. Depending on the configuration, you should see your default web-browser launch.
5. The page displayed should be your HP printer with a bunch of device information and tabs.
6. Under the “Information” tab, find the “Applications” --> “Webscan” item and click that hyperlink.
7. You now should have a page with some basic options to select the image format, a preview window, the size of the document, and to “Scan” or “Reset”.
8. I set accordingly, hit the Scan preview and saved the resultant scan file generated to my desktop.

I later bookmarked the web-page for quick reference in the future. You can see it in my bookmark bar above.

That got me going and I was able to complete Lavie’s project for me quite nicely, but the root problem was still present.

More digging around in that particular HP forum thread got me to the solution.

The recommended solution is to follow this tip from poster “pcwizard”.

My window looked like that already and clicking “Update the Device” didn’t fix the issue. However a careful re-reading this morning finds that what I should have done is to first remove the shortcuts on the right side list, apply the update to the device, then move them back from the left side to the right again, and update the device.  Had I done that, it probably would have worked.

Instead, I had to dig more and eventually found and applied this routine that did work as offered from “mstrees”.

I have one additional hint:

I found that the sequence of applying the fix steps is very important.  After following PCWizard's instructions in the 02-08-2012 post, the list appeared to be corrected, but I still received the message that the list needed to be upgraded.  Here's how I fixed it:

1. Follow all of PCWizard's steps and then reset the printer by:

2. Power on the printer and disconnect the power cord

3. Wait 60 seconds

4. Reconnect the power cord and allow the printer to power on

5. Press the Scan button on the front panel and confirm that the "No Scan Options" message appears

6. Open the HP Solution Center app on the PC

7. Choose Settings - Scan Settings - Scan To Setup

8. Click Update Device button

9. Press Scan button on Front panel of printer. The updated Scan To options will now appear.

10. Use Start Scan button to initiate scan from printer front panel. The "LCD List needs to be upgraded" message should no longer appear.

That cleared the error message and I was back to full scanning functionality.

Cheers!

--Claus Valca.

Bonus linkage: I later found this awesomely fun-to-read post & review from HP C6280 user Ventzislav Tzvetkov who got it working (quite nicely it seems) with his Amiga computer. Cool! HP Photosmart C6280 All-in-One (Multifunction Device)