Printer held Hostage by Ink Cartridge

Monday, April 7. 2008

Printer held Hostage by Ink Cartridge

I've had a Canon Pixma MX700 multifunction printer since the beginning of the year. I've been pretty happy with it. It's worked well for scanning, copying, faxing and printing. Until today. Today I needed to scan something, and was greeted with the following message when I turned it on:

U150 The following ink tank cannot be recognized.

The yellow cartridge was indicated. I though that it was an odd problem, but I didn't care for the moment, because I didn't want to print, just scan. But no button on the printer would bypass this error and let me scan.

I ended up calling Canon, and happily received a domestic phone rep. He had me try a couple things, but eventually decided that the yellow ink would need to be replaced. They would send me one free. I asked if there was any way to bypass the error so I could just scan, and he said there was not. If I wanted to use it today I would have to go out and buy a yellow ink cartridge. So after driving all the way across town and spending $16, I have my printer back...for now.

It seems like questionable design to cripple all the functions of the printer just because one color cartridge is faulty. A better failure mode would be to only prevent color printing. Black and white printing, and the other printer functions should still be usable. Hey Canon, how about updated firmware for this? Please?

Posted by Mike Boone in Tech at 20:57 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I've experienced the same U150 problem and error code on my MP600. In fact, I've had two failures in the past 3 months and expect others in the future. There's a major design flaw (obviously) in the ink tank/print head operation. The only bright spot is that Canon seems willing to replace the ink tanks that cause the U150 errors. Let's hope that continues.

#1 Ern Wyatt on 2008-05-12 18:08 (Reply)

I am having the same problem and cannot get anyone at Canon to return my calls or emails. Try being in the middle of printing off mailing responses for your dissertation and have this happen. It was working fine and then BOOM...although the Yellow tank is new AND I have replaced it with another new one - same thing. Now I am totally at the mercy of Canon and they know it. May return this all-in-one because this is something that cannot happen...dissertation is hard enough without printer problems!

#2 Debi (Homepage) on 2008-05-17 16:58 (Reply)

Actually, I've had the same problem, where all I want to do is scan something and it shows me that error message. Now, in desperation, I have been able to get it to work, but it's a guess-and-check method.
I take a tissue and just wipe the electrical part of the ink cartridge and then where I believe it would be "connecting" with the printer, lightly. I don't know if this has any effect.
The next step is to KEEP TRYING. If you JUST BARELY lift up the cover, it'll say "Cover Open" and then you close it and it'll "test" the system. After 5-10 tries it usually works.
I can scan and print TEXT. I cannot print out color images because the cartridge is made for colored photos. Black text is printable.

#3 David on 2008-08-07 09:45 (Reply)

I will give that a try next time, but I'm hoping there won't be a next time!

#3.1 Mike Boone (Homepage) on 2008-08-07 09:57 (Reply)

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