Help needed - IP4000

Hi all.
I'm new to this forum and I seek help on the following problem. My good old trusted ip4000 which I've had since 2006 was fine -believe it or not!- until only a few weeks ago. I would like to know if it can be saved and if the cost of saving it is worth it, or if I need to get a new printer. I realize that those old printers are way better than the the newer ones but I'm not a heavy user and print mostly b&w/color documents on plain paper.

Here's the timeline of my problems:

- At first it wouldn't print Yellow.
- Having no clue as to what to do I followed some advice on youtube and rinsed the printhead under the tap -I have a filter. (I have no idea if this was good or …awful advice.)
- The yellow came back but colors looked "smudged"
- Over the next days I kept rinsing and at one point I left the printhead in water overnight.
- A few days ago I noticed that all colors print fine except the PGBK which now doesn't print at all. First it was gone, then a bit of black came back, now nothing.

I have always used Canon ink tanks, I had never heard of refilling…. Silly me… Oh, well, live & learn.

Another possibly important piece of info is that the printer has never given a warning of printhead malfunction or anything else for that matter, no orange flashes -ever. The only thing I noticed a few weeks ago was "cannot print properly due to printhead overheated" or something like that. Not knowing what that meant I kept printing but at some point got worried, did some research and found that this is due to ink not passing through the head. So I stopped printing and have only printed test pages ever since.

Thanks for any info/help,
Lea

Here's a scan of my latest test page:

I don’t have any good news for you only bad, the print head is fried. (Print head over heated)

I cannot say whether it was your washing and rinsing that may have caused the problem, did you dry the print head thoroughly before putting it back in to your printer or not ?

A Canon print head needs ink inside it at all times so if your nozzle checks were bad that would suggest poor ink flow or clogs in the nozzles then if you continued to print while in this condition this will cause premature failure every time. (Over heating)

The reason I asked if you dried the head properly is that you going to need a new print head and if you didn’t completely dry it then you may have also damaged the logic board, so that in turn can damage a new print head, just like a merry-go-round.

The part number is QY6-0049 for CANON I865/IP4000/MP760/MP780 and can still be gotten on EBay but I dough if Canon stock them anymore.

The only good news I can give you is that you can continue to use your current print head in its present condition indefinitely but you’ll need to set the printer to use Matte paper in order to print text, it will still print photos great !

If it were me I would most certainly try to get a new print head because you have a real gem in that printer.
P.S. don’t get a cheap refurbished print head from China..

Thank you Hat for your reply. This is sad news indeed. Unfortunately I didn't dry the head thoroughly -the guy said it wasn't necessary... If only I had known.

My options are not that many as I can't afford to buy a new printhead for my ip4000 only to find out that the logic board is damaged. So my options are, either a used ip4300 taht I've found on the internet or a new ip7250. I read elsewhere that you pretty much hate the ip7250 but the comparison between ink tanks (capacity [pages] vs price) is interesting. There's not much of a difference between M/Y/C of the 4000 and the 7250- which is weird as the ink tank of the 7250 is 7 ml and that of the ip4000 13 ml... Black inks are a different story, but they also come in XL.

Also I'm not all that interested in refilling ink cartridges so the fact that the CLI-550 are not transparent is not a problem.

I guess I'm leaning towards the 7250 as I have no idea how much juice is left in the used 4300 + its inks are the most expensive of the three.

Again thank you for your help, and pls correct me if I'm hugely wrong in any of the above ...cogitations! Cheers!

BTW here's a comparison table --> Cyan

You have done a good bit of homework on the different cartridges and prices however you have forgotten one thing, the size.

The 551 is a tiny cartridge where as the CLI-8 and BCI-6 cartridges are more than twice the size, the CLI-8 is slightly dearer than the BCI-6 only because it has a chip.

The next thing to consider is that these newer printers do a lot more cleaning that the older one do so they tend to waste the inks that much faster, but if you can afford to run ANY printer on OEM inks then this shouldn’t be too big a problem for you.

Yes an iP7250 is cheaper to buy than a new print head but I can guarantee that after twelve months the cost savings on the CLI-8 inks will have well paid for the difference in the cost of the new print head.

Now you only get start-up cartridges with that printer so you’ll have to get another set of cartridges costing more than the original purchase price of the printer, O’ and I forgot to mention that these newer printer are very flimsy and the paper feed cartridge is very easy to damage.

There is quite a good possibility that if your iP4000 can print the 4 colours with the damaged head then the logic board has not been damaged and a new print head is a worthwhile long term investment..

There is one more problem with the iP7250. No resetter exists for the new PGI-550/CLI-551 cartridges, and as the cartridges are opaque, visual inspection of refilled cartridges to determine ink level is not an option.

Hat: Yes, I did notice that the CLI-551 cartridge is smaller, almost half the size of BCI-6. But I'm looking at quoted capacity (in terms of pages -target value) and they're almost the same. Which is weird but maybe it's due to more recent technology or something... I don't know.
Also, my ip4000 is 10 years old! Even with an undamaged logic board and a new printhead, it can't possibly live forever! Or can it?...

PeterBJ: Thanks for commenting, I realize it's a problem if you refill, but I don't believe I could do that... It sounds too complicated...

As a matter of fact this whole getting-a-new-printer thing is too complicated and it shouldn't be!

The answer is yes your iP4000 can last another ten years, because it’s built very well but that can’t be said for the new generation of printers.

Refilling is only completed if you think about it, but if you try it then it’s really simple..