Pixma TS6220 Black ink not printing

[Jlm11]

All ink cartridges are new. I have tried printer head and nozzle cleaning and still black ink just stopped printing. Anyone know the issue or how to resolve? Thank you

[ArthurJ]

Hi Jrddobbe,

We do have support available for your model printer.

 I recommend contacting our chat team. The real time support would be most beneficial in this case.

To get to the chat feature, click HERE. Once in the chat box, ask to speak to a live person. You will be asked to create a Canon account and once that is done, you will be able to connect with one of our chat agents Monday-Friday 8:00 am to 8:00 pm ET, excluding holidays.

We look forward to hearing from you.

[Ellenslavitz]

Considering how many people are having the same problem, I assume Canon purposely makes this printer cheap so you'll buy it, and pour quality so you'll buy another one. Never again.

[Pineywood17 · Accepted solution]

Spoke to customer service about this. Representative said it is because the nozzle below the printer cartridge gets plugged, usually after some period of nonuse.  Run two deep cleanings, if that doesn't work, remove ink cartridges and gently wipe each round nozzle (on printer not cartridge)with a q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol and let them dry.  Replace cartridge and try printing.  Says photo work around will not work - different kind of ink.  If cleaning nozzle does not work, it needs an $80 repair, so most people buy a new printer.  Canon offers an upgrade discount (1-866-443-8002).  Way to avoid this is to store cartridges in a zip lock bag if they won't be used for "awhile".

[Pineywood17]

We won't be purchasing Canon again.  Bad for the environment to have to buy a new printer because some jets dried up.

[cblue]

So glad I found this thread. The black cartridges on my TS6220 also stopped working when I used it for the first time after a long period of nonuse. Following Patrick's advice above to do printhead cleaning maintenance a few times did solved the problem (whew! Thank you, Patrick). Also, I took the time to read the manual and found out that my bad habit of unplugging the printer without turning it off first may have kept the print head holder from "parking" to the right which is its preventive measure to keep the print heads from drying out. I'm happy with my Canon printers. My old PIXMA MX920 still works like a champ. Both stay connected with my WiFi barring any power failure or network reset, unlike the HP printers I used to have.

[robertglez]

I've been having this issue for several months and was about to dump my Pixma TS6250 and buy a new printer. I had already tried most of the suggestions in this thread (pattern printing, cleaning and deep cleaning multiple times, all of the cleanings in the Maintenance settings, etc. ) with no success whatsoever, other than set it to High quality printing so that it didn't use the PGBK cartridge and could get the black lines print normally. However this is useless for double-sided automatic printing of long documents which is what I use the most.

Today I decided to re-read the thread and give it a last try, and now I have my printer working again flawlessly!!! Here's what I did: I started by printing the head pattern and the PGBK line was indeed completely blank. The other lines were perfect. Tried printing a colour document and of course the black characters were missing completely. Tried one normal cleaning and a couple of deep cleanings (I had already tried that some weeks ago). No success. So rather than thinking that it could be a circuit board failure as some people have mentioned, which is not possible to resolve as a customer, I thought it should just be the most probable cause: a PGBK header clogging, and I did my last attempt: remove the PGBK cartridge and drip a few drops of pure alcohol (96º) on the printer's header/ink pad. I didn't have any fancy tools at hand so I wrapped some toilet paper around the tip of my toothbrush, gently pressed the ink pad a few times and dried the area. Some black ink started to exude from the pad. Then tried again the header pattern printing and BOOM! A simply perfect PGBK grid pattern line came out, where it was totally blank before 🙂 I've tried printing a few documents and they were printed out perfectly.

So I would say that most of the problems we're seeing here are due to these bloody clogged printer headers. If you feel hopeless about it and want to give it a last try before dumping the printer, just try the above instructions to see if it works for you.