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Why is my printer only printing in black and blue?

My printer is only printing in black and blue ink - please could you help me as to why that may be.?

  • Hello there, My printer is a Canon PIXMA iP1500 and for some strange reason it only prints in black ink and blue. There is plenty of ink in both the black cartridge and the coloured cartridge but the coloured cartridge only prints blue. If I print something from my Yahoo e-mail account everything prints in blue, even the normal text that you would expect to be black given that the black cartridge is full. However, if I print from 'Word' it does print in black but won't print in any other colour. It isn't a new printer and previously worked brilliantly well so I've no idea what's changed. I'm not at all technical so straight forward answers in layman's term would be much appreciated. Have you any idea what the problem may be and what I should do about it? Thank you very much in advance.

  • Answer:

    The other colors may be dry or empty in the cartridge, or the jets are jammed for those colors. Are you using a bona fide Canon ink cartridge or a third-party? Off brand third party stuff is notorious for jamming the newer printers. Cartridges that have ink still in them may still register as 'empty' to the software that tries to monitor them. There was an article in PC World magazine about that. Have you tried running the cleaning cycle? Look in the Pgorams menu for a menu entry to the printer setup or maintenance, or Right-click on the printer and select Properties. You see Nozzle cleaning utility there somewhere. I don't have a Canon so I can't say exactly.

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you need a new color cartrige.

george 2

You could try taking the colour cartridge out and gently wiping the bottom of it where the ink comes out with a dampened piece of kitchen paper to see if all the colours come out on to the paper. If they do not then it could be that ink has dried up on the outside of the cartridge so that not all the colours can come to print correctly. If there are colours that don't transfer on the damp paper or some come out more that others try putting a small amount of hot water into a saucer and placing the cartridge print head side down (bottom) in the hot water and see if that clears the dried up ink. Please only put a shallow amount of water in the saucer and do not imerge the cartridge into any water as this will ruin it. Just leave it a few minutes first.All the ink colours should run into the water if it's unblocked it so as soon as you see them take it out of the water and wipe the botton only very gently with a dry piece of paper towel in gently forward strokes not wiping the dishes dry stokes if you are heavy hand like I am! If its not bloked then another thing to try is to run the printers cleaning cycle which should be in your maintaintainace tab which you should find if you press the preference button on your printer menu. If none of those work then I have no other ideas as those are the most likely causes of ink being in the cartridge but not printing out. I have no idea why it will print black sometimes but not other either. But I did have a similar problem with my Canon and everything was pink. I had a blocked printer head but as I have a 5 ink system I had to have a whole new print head. As you have a two cartridge printer your print heads are in built in to the cartridges so see if the water helps to unblock them. Edit Just seen your edit. When you ran the cleaning programme did you do the regual one or the deep one? The deep one is supposed to unblcok the nozzles as this can be a cause of colours printing badly. I had to do the nozzle clean on mine the other day as at first I thought the print head had blocked again as it was printing lines in anything coloured black. Ran nozzle clean (deep clean) and now working fine. Below is an article about the nozzle clean and its the one for your printer. As it says if that does not solve the problem then you may need a new printer as to get it reapired could cost more. http://canon-resetter-repair.blogspot.com/2008/08/maintenance-printer.html

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