hp deskjet 3050 j610 'incompatible tri color cartridge'?

As the Black 122 did not last enough after refills, I installed a continuous system myself.
- Tired of not being able to avoid the 'carriage jam' I had it reinstalled where I bought it, with new cartridges.
- Printed Ok 6 sheets, turned it off, turned it on 2 days after and now always shows 'incompatible tri color cartridge'.
- I cleaned the cartridge AND carriage contacts.
- I tried all forms of regional reset and reflash: press buttons 2+3 and On (Shows 'reflash 12345' and there it stays), unplug, press Ok+Cancel+On and reset the language and country (I chose Latin America, cartridges purchased in Argentina); keep pressed Cancel while plugging in between the mentioned steps...
All of these were performed obeying the plug - unplug sequences as shown in other posts, and without connecting the USB.
The error remains even if I put old cartridges that had NEVER shown THAT error before!.
The hp could not break down in the hours it was not being used. Is that error a time bomb after repeated 'carriage jams' (a suspicious behavior)? Did I properly perform the Reflash?
Thank you!

I checked your printer model and it uses the cartridges HP61/HP61XL in the US or HP301/HP301XL in Europe. I guess the cartridges are named HP122/HP122XL in your country?

This family of cartridges seem to be fragile, and only last for a limited number of refills. Open and short circuits seem to develop in the cartridge electronics, especially if the cartridge has been totally emptied. If the cartridge has become defective no reset of the printer's EEPROM data will change that fact.

You can refill the cartridges if they are still electrically OK and have not been clogged. You will have to accept error messages and nag screens, but you can ignore these and print.

I have no experience with HP 61 cartridges, but I have refilled the very similar HP 60 or HP300 in Europe, the also similar 56, 57, 21, 22 and more. My success rate for refill is below 50% though.

I searched for a service manual for your printer but found none. Instead here is a link to a site with a wealth of info and instructions about various HP printers. Specially note this and this. In case you don't know, the underlined words are links.

LW1ECP said:

- I tried all forms of regional reset and reflash: press buttons 2+3 and On (Shows 'reflash 12345' and there it stays), unplug, press Ok+Cancel+On and reset the language and country (I chose Latin America, cartridges purchased in Argentina); keep pressed Cancel while plugging in between the mentioned steps...
All of these were performed obeying the plug - unplug sequences as shown in other posts, and without connecting the USB.
The error remains even if I put old cartridges that had NEVER shown THAT error before!.
The hp could not break down in the hours it was not being used. Is that error a time bomb after repeated 'carriage jams' (a suspicious behavior)? Did I properly perform the Reflash?
Thank you!

Click to expand...

Do you have any links for the HP reflashing and other info about HP printers? Canon is my preferred brand of inkjet printers, but I also have some HP's and I refill and service a couple of HP AIO's for family and friends, so I'm very interested in technical info about HP inkjet printers also.

I think the problems are not related to the reflash, unless you accidentally changed your location. These HP printers and cartridges are regionalized like newer Canon printers and cartridges. Accidentally setting the printer to a wrong region would cause the cartridges to be rejected and the printer would become inoperable. "Incompatible" instead of "Defective" cartridges suggests to me that the printer might have been set to a wrong region. Can you confirm that the printer is still set to the proper region?

If the region is correct, I think the tri-colour cartridge or maybe both cartridges might have become defective.

I don't think a logical time bomb is involved, but there have been reports of newer Canon printers no longer being able to enter service mode after a number of entries or after having had the printer serviced, and I have a suspicion that HP and Canon are closely related, so maybe?

Good luck with the troubleshooting, I hope the links will be helpful.

PeterBJ: many thanks for your valuable hints! I'll try them and let you know.

PeterBJ, the document covering the Tap 41 Diagnostic Test stated that an "Incompatible" error could not be bypassed in order to be able to diagnost the cartridge. So I emptied my savings account and purchased one more tricolor. The error remained!!! And I was sure I had set the region correctly. I had cleaned both the cartridge and carriage contacts before, but I decided to try again with the carriage ones, this time I moisted the swab, and immediately dried with the dry end. Successss!!! It was an intermittent bad contact. Why the hell didn't it happen as soon as I had the continuous system installed! Now I am a happy man again. Thank you for your assistance, the documents you pointed me to can be very valuable if a real problem develops in the future.

Thanks for the feed back.

Contact problems are a common cause of problems with HP ink cartridges. How to clean the contacts is often described in the user manual, and also on the official HP website, an example here. Most likely the problem was caused by dirty contacts in the cartridge carriage, as an other cartridge didn't help. In use an inkjet printer is a veritable miniature spray booth and ink dust accumulates on every surface inside the printer, sometimes causing problems.

The reason I didn't think of cleaning the contacts was that I thought something had gone wrong with the reflash or the cartridge had failed.

A final comment: a short time after thoroughly cleaning the carriage contacts, the problem appeared again. It was just by chance it has been apparently corrected by the cleaning, may be it was a false contact. So I took the printer to a service shop (I am an electronics engineer but I couldn't figure out how to disassemble it) and they "changed the cartridge holder", that was the only explanation. But the printer has performed flawlessly since then. If it was really the carriage contacts, it was not something that could be cleaned, I suspect insufficient spring action of carriage contacts against cartridge ones. But now I am a happy human!

Thank you for the update.