How To Clean Epson CX5400 Printer Head?

Epson CX5400 Printer Problem - Doesn't recognize full black cartridge?

• Adopted the printer. Says that there isn't any black ink. The cartridge is so full it sloshes. Everything "looks" fine in there - the tube is connected. I don't think it's clogged because if it were that, it would at least ATTEMPT to print. It won't let me do a cleaning or alignment or anything until I get this problem fixed (which is annoying). Should I go buy another ink cartridge to see if that fixes the problem? And if I do buy one and it doesn't work, are you able to return it? I wouldn't think so but a lot of stores do amazing things sometimes. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. Thanks for your help and have a great day! Amy

• Answer:

  Hi there. I have lots of printers - 200 or so. I have fought with quite a number of models similar to yours, winning only occasionally.... usually loosing. You state the tube is connected - and I wonder what tube. The carts do not have any tubes on them. Looking at the documentation for the exact catridge you are using, the BLACK ink T032120$33.24 on the web, and looking at the PDF of the printer manuals on the web, your machine is almost identical to many of the units I am familiar with. The only tube is a vaccuum hose under the print head cleaning mechanism. The last person who posted a question stated that they used the printer for over a year with no problems, and changed the ink but it prints nothing. I asked how they went about changing the ink carts for a year, and later they posted that they never changed the carts in a year, and then let it sit - ouch... when they went to use it again, even with new carts, it would not print... Please note in brief, that the print carts on the TOP of the print head assembly have nothing to do with the print head drying out on the nozzle area - inches away....at the far bottom. Here is my reply to the question.... ______________________________________… I have a couple of new epson printers. The new cx printers are extremely hard to fill. How did you fill them in the first place? If you drill or melt a hole in the top, in the EXACT correct position, and slowly fill them, letting the air and ink bubbles exhaust, then, they are "full". I weigh the cartridges when new, and when empty, and when re-filled, so that I know if indeed, they are re-filled. You can now buy gram or ounce weight digital scales everywhere, including kitchen stores, and retail outlets, and they are 20 bucks or so, and very accurate. Check the carts to see if on the front, bottom or back edge there is a tiny green circuitboard attached to ink cart with two melted dots of case plastic posts. If so, then you have otherwise, a piece of plastic, contaning 35 cents worth of ink, with a self-destruct programmable chip on it. Every time you use ink, the chip is programmed by 7 gold contact points, and the printer "guesses" how much ink you have, and subtracts it. At about 25 per cent to 33 percent full, the chip is told that you are out of ink. This rather full piece of plastic, is then DEAD, and cannot be used again. I have used a new, FULL cart, and simply run the CLEAN HEAD Epson utility a few times, and been told that the carts are now 50 percent Full ( HALF EMPTY !!! -- and I hadn't printed anything yet!!! ) The extra caution in telling a cart with ink in, that it is empty, is done to prevent the cart from ever really emptying, which would suck air into the carriage fill post nozzel, and into an inch or two of piping inside the print carriage / head assembly, and in 20 minutes the ink inside these tubes would dry, and almost permanently destroy the tiny print holes ability to re-wet with any new ink. If you take out a cart, you must either put in a new one immediately, or re-fill immediately. I have seen many Epsons in the garbage - all with badly dried print head / carriage assemblies - if you have a SCANNER/ PRINTER, such as my CX printers, the second the print head is "told" by estimation software, that it is "empty" the entire machine, including the scanner is DEAD, since, when you turn it on, you cannot get past the ERROR ink out message !!!!. The Espon printers with the "new and improved" print ink heads and ink carts, are EXTREMELY fragile, and will self-destruct at the tiniest problem. If the power goes off, and the head is not parked, it dries out. If you take out a cart and go to the store with the cart to make certain you have the correct one, the print head dries out. You cannot take out the print head to soak it in water without completely tearing the printer apart, and removing the delicate microfilm plastic position strip, and the drive belt, and many fragile parts... If you do manage to get the print head out, the print head is extremely delicate, and ordinary tap water will contaminate the print head holes, and actually clog the head worse than the dried ink. Using paper products with sharp cellulose fibers clogs the heads, if you wipe the heads.. ( one webiste uses strips of coffee filters and distilled water, with some success ). The green, self destructing programmable chips on the empty pieces of plastic cases, ARE RE-PROGRAMMABLE, and programmers are available at most decent computer retailers, such as COMP USA, FRYs, Staples, Business Depot, etc., since these reputable companies know that the customers are being ripped off with being forced to purchase 50 cent ink carts, that are not even empty, for 40 times the cost of manufacture! You MUST make certain that the programmer you purchase LISTS the printer model, or the cart model, since there are dozens of programmers, and Epson keeps changing the programming on new models, so that customers are forced to buy only over-priced Epson" carts! I am surprised that you state you FILLED an Epson cart, which is one of the most difficult carts to fill ( I have hundreds of printers), and yet you don't know about the programmable chip on the side of the cart... I use advice from several Epson user sites, and cut out a section of useless plastic on the top of the cart, and cover the melted access hole with black electrical tape, which restores the cart back to the original micro-channel air ducting. Leaving a big, ugly gaping hole in the top, as all webistes I have seen, tell users to do, in view of how fast the ink dries rock hard, is stupid, to say the least. Search dogpile.com or yahoo's search engine to find EPSON INK REFILL website pages, and there are some excellent resources, with pictures. Generally, anyone I know who has been inadvertently duped into purchasing one of the new Epson programmable ink cart machines, eventually throws it in the garbage in frustration. Sales people are either ignorant, or devious, in not telling customers that they are buying a product that self-destructs, and wastes ink, and is extremely fragile. Even the EPSON instructions have pages of warnings of "do not touch " this, "do not do that" Caution - you must Immediately replace cart, etc. etc. and these warnings are SERIOUS. Most people don't even read the pages of fine print. I will never purchase an Epson programmable chip printer (printer scanner) etc. again, and will tell everyone who asks to avoid them like the plague. SOOooooooo.... As long as you replaced the carts IMMEDIATELY after re-filling, and parked the heads properly, your machine is probably not dead ... YET. Every minute you wait with out printing a page, causes the print heads, EVEN PARKED, to dry out - the pad that they sit on "helps" to seal out air, but is connected to a vaccum pump that sucks ink out every time the unit is turned on, AND, the fiberous material the heads rest on gets saturated with gooey ink, that eventually hardens by itself, no matter what you do ! The vaccuum system used to "clean" the Epson printer heads is connected to the ENTIRE print head... this means that, for example, if Yellow and RED print head holes are clogged, the vaccuum does not change its location or pressure, so that the "clean" process sucks twice as much ink out of the BLACK and BLUE ( Since the yellow and red are clogged ) and has little effect on the desired purpose of actually "cleaning" the clogged print holes. This explains why some cartridges can be almost empty and others almost full, while the "estimated" ink levels show all colours are equal. The vaccuum process on the new machines only works when there is no problem in the first place, and wastes huge amounts of ink... The assembly, the heads, and the design is inherently self-destructing, without a great deal of difficult cleaning and maintenance, which is totally beyond most typical consumers. If you really want to keep the machine, have TWO sets of ink carts, - one set always full. Tape the bottom hole of the full, spare set, after filling (clean it first), with black electrical tape to seal the nozzle from dirt and air. Put electrical tape over the air hole you created to fill it. When the carts show the EMPTY warning, and the machine halts dead, quickly install the new, re-progrmmed, filled ink carts, and then print a test page, etc. Re-fill, and re-program ALL the inks carts you just removed (not just the one that first reported it was "empty" ), and tape over the holes, and set aside. Weigh the "empty" carts before and after filling - you will find, surprisingly, that even though the ink status monitor shows 3 carts at 25% empty, some will be practically full, while others are truly almost dead empty... (which is dangerously close to sucking in air and destroying the print head !!!! ) You "can" keep one of these machines up and running efficiently and COST EFFECTIVELY, but it is a pain in the butt, and messy, -- The only "OK" thing about these printers is that they actually DO deliver a reasonable quality print when they actually "work" properly. Going out and purchasing cases of new, EPSON brand ink carts would bankrupt most users, and would be ridiculous beyond words in an office environment, where hundreds of pages are printed a day. I have seen many EPSON printers with RED and YELLOW ink passages dried rock hard -- with brand new full ink Red and Yellow carts on top -- because in an office environment, hundreds of black and white TEXT pages are printed, and Epson uses BLUE and BLACK to make the black printing, but NOT the Red and Yellow, which dry out solid - in a brand new machine, which is in use everyday, and parked properly, with brand new EPSON carts, which have to be purchased regularly, to keep the Black and White pages going, EVEN THOUGH the old Red and Yellow carts are absolutely FULL, - since the the printer has no idea how much ink is really being used- just that the carriage is going back and forth, and it "estimates" that the red and yellow are, eventually empty, even though the ink tubes and print head are rock solid with ink, and the New, FULL, Epson Carts, are never used. -- they can't be used, since the tubes are blocked solid! I hope this advice helps to keep your machine going a bit longer. You need a great deal of luck. You need to spend an hour ot two on the web researching how to fill the carts properly, and how the inside technology of the manifold air/liquid compartments work, and how to HANDLE the carts carefully, etc. Some of the NO-Name, non-Epson carts are cheaper, and MUCH easier to fill, but there are to date, no web instructions on how to re-fill the clone carts. They also have the "new and improved" Epson feature of killing your print every time with a message that you must acknowledge, stating that you are NOT USING A GENUINE EPSON ink cart, and print quality may suffer - do you wish to continue? This deliberate halting of normal print makes using clones very time consuming, and difficult - which, is of course, exactly what the Corporate Epson executives want to do in the first place !! To get around this, you can take the original green chips off the original Epson carts, and put them on the new, easy to fill, clone carts, and the printer will never know the difference. If you REALLY want to make the units easy, you can rip apart the printer, and remove the green circuit board from the printhead, with the gold contacts, remove the thin plastic electrical cable that plugs into the print head ink cart sensors, and place the cable on the top of the printer. By placing the chips on the cart reader on the TOP of the machine, the stupid "estimator" program will think that the carts in the print head are connected, and give warnings on the completely non-working chips on top of the printer. You can then quickly re-program the accessible, top mounted chips, and only replace ink carts that are actually getting low ( you can weigh them), in half the time and effort. However, since the carts do not hold very much ink in the FIRST PLACE, you will still be forced to refill on a frequent basis. If I ever get the time I have a few other mechanical and programming ideas to try to see if I could continually re-program the ink cart chips on top of the unit automatically, and use micro plastic tubes to permanently fill the carts on the moving printhead, using huge bottles of ink, mounted on the back of the machine. The Epson carts have an anti- overfill, anti-drip pressure operated diaphram fill mechanism which would work under such a scheme, but would be too difficult for the average home or office user to build and install... Generally, for all the ridiculous expense and time and problems encountered with this Epson line of printer ( and printer /scanner) I would simply buy something else, and avoid the problems. Sony got greedy and deliberately put viruses on new-instore music CDs, and Epson, in my opinion got greedy and invented this printer from hello... Both companies are shooting themselves in the foot, and making people AVOID their products.... Again, good luck. Please do your homework on the web, and observe all cautions and warnings. This is one case where every piece of fine print REALLY applies! robin graves Feb17th 2006 Source(s): Been there, seen it, done it. Asker's Rating: It is not an answer to my question... It is a full thesis on the subject of EPSON CX4600 printer issue. Thank you, Robin. You've saved few hours of my precious time and about $100 expenses for new ink cratriges. As of now both of my CX4600 are in the trash. I WILL NEVER BUY EPSON GARBIGE AGAIN!!! ______________________________________… Now, after all this, please do not get discouraged - I have no idea what shape your printer is in, or how long it was left to dry out, or how "dried" the heads are... you could be lucky and have a simpler problem that may fix itself. 1/ make certain that the ink cart is the correct one - I listed the number at the top here 2/ the gold contacts on the chip MUST be clean - check that the chip on the cart has shiny contacts - clean with a damp, slightly soapy cloth and dry 3/ re- insert the cart. You should get SOME kind of error message - it should state " XX XX X X X X " and this error message is not trivial - please post it to get more help without everyone guessing ! As to your question about buying another ink cart just to check, I would highly advise against this unless you have checked everything else, and can get black ink out the printhead using the wet blotter paper first. If black ink is actually comming out the printhead , then you are doing great. If you can touch the printhead and get a full bar of black ink across the head, then you are probably ok. It is at this specific point that I find 99% of the problem - not the top of the print assembly, inches away. No store ever that I have heard of will take back an opened ink cart ! In California at frys or in New York or CompUSA or Business Depot/Staples, Best Buy, Future Shop, etc. etc. I have never heard of opened ink returns ! ! Sometimes Business Depot/ Staples will give you a little pile of printer paper if you give them a cart - but the price listed for your cart is $33.xx plus tax, and to get a $2.95 pad of used recycled paper for $30 seems a bit of a waste. There is a LOT of information in the posting above, which may have ideas that you can use. If these fail, post your actions, and I will check back.. Good Luck robin