I got a second hand printer a few months ago and I bought some remanufactured ink cartridges to save money. Everything was working fine until today when I tried to print and I just got blank pages coming out. I looked it up and I read a post that suggested unplugging it and taking out the ink cartridges, replacing them and turning it back on. When I did that however, I suddenly started getting “check ink 1401 col bk” message and it wouldn’t print at all, or do anything other than display the same error message. I looked this up and there doesn’t seem to be any advice I can find other than to buy new cartridges and if that fails then replace the printer.
I’ve already tried cleaning the cartridges and the print head contacts with rubbing alcohol and soaking the bottoms of the cartridges in warm water but that didn’t do anything. I see that a lot of other pixma printers can have these sorts of error messages overridden by holding down the stop button for 5-10 seconds but I’ve tried that and nothing happened.
Can anyone suggest anything I could try? I’ve seen some suggestions that 1401 error messages can be caused by the print head not being on properly, and that it might be fixed by taking it off and putting it back on, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that and I’m afraid that I might break it if I try to force it.
