Epson Stylus CX6400 Printer/Scanner not working!?

Question

Worked perfect for two years until I changed cartridges, not for Epson, now paper blank. I have uninstalled and reinstalled software, nothing. The printer is recognising the cartridges and telling me how much ink is left. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

I work at a Epson Service center, and have quite a bit of experience with the problem you are encountering. Its the same problem with the CX5200/5400 and CX6400/6600.

The problem exists because there is a section of tubing inside the printer, that is for the pump assy that is clogged. The problem occurred a while ago, but you didn't see it until you changed your ink cartridge. At that point, a small amount of air gets into the print head, and normally the printer would do a cleaning cycle to clear the air out ( a cleaning cycle literally sucks ink from the bottom of the print head, and wipes the bottom) The problem lies in the fact that since the tubing for the pump is clogged, it can't really suck anything. It trys to, but without the tubing being clear, you can run cleaning cycles till the cows come home, but it won't clear the clog in the tubing. The simple solution is to clean out the tubing, but it does require a fair amount of dis-assembly, and some technical know how.

If the printer only developed this problem recently, you might be able to dis-assemble the printer, remove the pump assy, clean the tubing, and have a working printer when you re-assemble, but in my experience, if you have left the printer sitting for a period of time (over a month) since the problem occurred, your best off just going and getting a new printer.

Answer 2

I know this may sound absurd... but....

DID YOU TAKE THE PROTECTIVE TAPE OFF THE CARTRIDGE'S PRINTHEAD?

Believe it or not I've seen many who have forgotten to do so!


According to Epson's troubleshooting site....

Blank pages print
Try one or more of these solutions:


Make sure that you are using the appropriate printer driver for this product.

Windows users can make sure that this product is selected as the default printer.

Check the settings on the Main menu (Windows) or in the Page Setup dialog box (Macintosh). Make sure the settings are appropriate for the paper size you are using.

Run the Head Cleaning utility to clear any clogged nozzles. See

Answer 3

Try the cleaning cycles in the Maintenance section.

If you give up, take any unopened cartridges to STAPLES, and get a Canon printer. You can exchange the cartridges for the Canon cartridges that you will need.

I switched from HP deskjet to Canon inkjets. The price was similar, but the Canon cartridges are much cheaper. When talking with professional photographers, they prefer Canon colors over any other.

Read the reviews at http://www.cnet.com and other places.

Answer 4

u have given inadequate info
still
1st try printing a test page
if it doesnt print, remove the cartridges and check the ink head is not dry
if dry (rub a finger across, u should get a small stain), take a few ml of spirit (ur nail paint remover should work fine) and keep the cartridge in it for about 10 mins, remove , wipe with soft flannel and then retry printing
most probably the problem is the cartridge & not the printer if its doing everything else.

Answer 5

1) be sure that you have compatible cartridges (double check)
2) be sure that the cartridges look clean, no contaminents on the metal portion that contacts the jets
3) go to control panel, and printer, or use your epson bundled software to try to clean the nozzles on the printer

My guess would be dried ink clogging the jets.

Answer 6

get a new printer... this one is broke

Answer 7

Had same issue got solution http://goo.gl/MRqn9V

Answer 8

There are a number of answers on this page at the time I
gave this answer.
2 answers state to get another printer.
3 answers state different ways to try to revive the PRINT HEAD
which the authors suspect is clogged with dried ink.

One person states that you do not give enough details, which I
agree...

People often replace the printheads LONG AFTER the printer
needs them, allowing time for the PRINT HEAD nozzels,
an inch or two UNDER the refill ink carts to DRY SOLID...

If you were notified by the software to replace the ink carts, and
said " I'll do it later" and left the unit for weeks, then the head
nozzels are likely dry.

One person states to getly rub your finger on the PRINT HEAD to
see if there is a smudge of liquid ink. Try this. If you get NO INK.
then the print head is clogged dry. Putting ink in the top of the
moving carriage, an inch or two away from the dried head
will do nothing.

One person states to use SOLVENT on the heads, and I generally avoid generic solvents, since the glues used to assemble
the head itself could be affected. I usually use water, and on the
web, there are hundreds of people with your problem who are trying various methods to revive the print head. WATER , out of
the tap, can contain contaminants that clog the printhead, and
the PAPER towels or blotters used to soak the heads may contain micro
particles of cellulose that clog the head nozzel holes...

One person on the web suggested ordinary COFFEE FILTER
paper folded into a blotter, soaked in distilled water ( at a drugstore ), and gently placed under the print head to soak.
I have had limited success with this method, but every machine
is different, with a different degree of clogging, so it may work.

The CLEANING routine in this printer uses a VACCUUM PUMP to
suck liquid out of the heads. If all 4 colours are dead, completely
as you describe, you will likely have limited success at this, and
you will PROGRAM the annoying chips of the carts to "USE UP"
a great deal of ink that you are NOT using, and if you repeat the
cleaning often enough, the machine will report that the new,
full carts are empty, when no ink at all has been used....

If you have been successfully filling the ink for 2 years as you state, then you WERE doing the refill process correctly and
something is different with this refill - WHAT DID YOU DO DIFFERENTLY -- did you replace the ink immediately when the
printer reported the ink empty? -- or did you wait long enough to
have the print head dry out?

If you did not wait TOO LONG, you may be able to revive the printer
with a water blotter.

My typical answer to this question is repeated below, -- please
do not get discouraged, and at least try to get the unit going...
The print quality is good, and the machine is great when it actually is working...


My Previous answer to how to get the unit working is :

___________________________________________________


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 sunject 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!!!

___________________________________________________


As I stated before, this is only one opinion, try to re-wet the dried
ink on the printhead. You have nothing to loose..

Please check that you have the following cartridges:

T044520 Colour Multipack
T044420 Yellow
T044320 Magenta
T044220 Cyan
T044120 Standard Black
T043120 High Capacity Black

hope this helps

robin