A few weeks ago Lavie’s attempt to subsidize the economic recovery of HP by printing every web-page possible off the church’s sadly broken (and per her audit) and miscoded website met a roadblock.
Our generally reliable HP Photosmart C6280 printer was throwing a cryptic error message.
HP ink system failure 0xc18a0106
Reboots and restarts of the device didn’t help. Nor did reseating all the ink cartridges.
A web-search came out with loads of folks who have also been stymied by this event.
I followed a number of links and eventually arrived at some guides that described how to access the technician’s sub-menu of the device.
Ink System Failure Error on HP Printers – The Lost Documentation
You will find all kinds of dire warnings for consumers to not be fiddling around and blindly making actions in this area as terribly bad and devastating things can occur with your printer.
HP Photosmart C8180 and C6280 Secret Menu – The Lost Documentation
No matter, I’m a sysadmin/technician and thus have no qualms about fiddling around and blindly making actions in obscure control panels and low-level setting menus!
Eventually I was able to clear enough of the error items via this menu to get it restored to functionality.
I did notice that the brand-new cyan cartridge it was originally complaining about showed 1/2 full status after all was said and done. As I understand it, that could be because of a low filled ink unit (unlikely) or somehow the device was reading the old cart data and applied it to the new cart when it was put in while troubleshooting the earlier issue. And we had a similar issue with our yellow cart suddenly dropping volume significantly as well…despite no printing.
HP brand printer ink is very expensive. That’s the game. And as I’m not sure that the issues have truly been resolved, I’ve asked Lavie to order the next round of replacement ink we need from this third-party location. This isn’t to be seen as any form of GSD blog endorsement…yet…more like a bat-signal in Gotham in case anyone has any feedback they might like to leave regarding third-party printer ink sourcing.
LD Remanufactured Cartridges for HP 02 Ink - LD Products
Normally we spend about $20 for a black cartridge and $55 for a 5-pack of the HP 02 color set package. That’s about $75 for a full single-set of all the cartridges needed.
LD Products offers us x3 black ink units and x2 of the color units for 1/2 the price of a single HP set.
For draft-level printing (we rarely do photo-quality printing though it does happen occasionally) that seems like a pretty good deal for the type of printing Lavie does.
It’s much cheaper and if the printer is really on the way out, then it will be less of an experimental loss than were we to buy the HP ink and have to toss them if the printer was replaced and we couldn’t find a compatible unit.
I’ll let you know our results with the product when it comes in.
Cheers!
--Claus V.
No comments:
Post a Comment