Printer problems

I have had a HP Deskjet D1460 since 2008 and it has served well. But recently has been playing up. If the printer has been left idle for a number of hours and you send a print to it it will either flash the power light furiously and do nothing or more often shoot the cartridge carriage to the right quite violently and go into error state (slow power button flashing).

The latter is easy to fix as a press of the power button and the printer starts initialising and eventually spits out the print. If the printer is not left idle, eg used quite often there are no problems.

I have managed to print a self-test sheet and the last error recorded was 405a0303 but google turns up nothing when searching this error or for service manual.

I have a D1560 on the way from ebay in the hope it will just drop in and work, although it is untested as there is no PSU with it. It was only £6.99 delivered. Any ideas on my D1460?

Sounds like something is not emerging from sleep / power save state. Possibly comms related.

At least it's giving an error code - just a matter of finding a source to decode it. I expect due to age, some component may have failed. Quite what or if it is easily replace/repairable, dunno 🤷‍♀️

I posted in the HP Community and an HP rep has asked for the Serial number by PM which have supplied. Will see if they can decode the error.

Hope you get to the bottom of it. Though the replacement at £6.99 all in sounds pretty good too.

Yes if it works. I also have my eye on a Canon All in one that has only printed 9 pages for the princely sum of £9.99 plus post. Only problem I might have with the Canon is getting it to work on Linux.

I had a Canon flatbed scanner years ago, that was a bit like that. Planned obsolescence through lack of Canon driver updates (though you could eventually get third party drivers)

I moved to ScanSnap units and never looked back.

I am not bothered about the Scanner on the Cannon AIO, as I have a flatbed Lide 220 which works with Windows and Linux (Linux auto detects fortunately) but the good thing about the HP printers they are small footprint and fit on a desk shelf nicely. The Canon looks a bit of a beast.

Got the D1560 printer for parts and it works fine. Need to leave it overnight to see if it comes out of power save correctly but not bad for £6.99.

Also got a Canon TS5350a coming next week to replace my 25 year old Deskjet 710c which still works but you have to buy cartridges to print 1000 pages and they are getting pricey.

Edited by Banger (Thu 07-Nov-24 20:52:08)

In Linux the HPLIP Head Cleaning and Pen Alignment functions of the driver dont work. Have filed a bug to the HP Development team. But in the meantime a poster on the Solus forum found the answer on a Fedora bug list. So have spent about ten minutes editing the script that controls Head Cleaning and Pen Alignment to add a b flag to the script (binary) which the Fedora bug solved. Have notified HP team on their bug list.