Have you ever come across a problem with your inkjet printer where it suggests that something is amiss with your printheads?

It’s something that is quite common but something that does confuse many people.

Recently we came across Sophie on Twitter, who appeared to be getting close to the end of her tether with her printer! So we wondered if we could offer some assistance:

 

Sophie told us that her printer was a Kodak ESP 3200. She said that she’d managed to resolve her problem after posting about her frustrations, but was still confused as toΒ why she was having difficulty in the first place:

This is actually quite a common problem, not just with the Kodak, but many other inkjet printers, too.

Firstly, it’s worth explaning what the printhead does. Essentially its job is to shoot ink from your cartridges onto your page. You place your ink cartridges on top of your printheads when you open your printer.

Now, in our experience, when error messages relating to a printhead or printheads occurs, it sometimes works to remove your ink cartridges and then reinserting them:


And this is exactly what Sophie did. But then she asked this:

Now this is something that many people ask us. With this particular printer you cannot buy a replacement printhead in this country direct from Kodak or a supplier. It’s worth noting that you can for other printers, however it’s not something that’s particularly commonplace and many manufacturers advise against doing this.

But you can clean your printheads. It’s incredibly easy for ink to dry on the end of the printhead nozzles and cause a clog, especially if the printer isn’t used regularly. So here’s what we advised Sophie to do:

As one final thing you can do, you can always take your printhead out and reinsert it to see if it has the same effect as removing and reinserting the ink cartridges did for Sophie. Kodak outline exactly how to take your printhead out in this post, as well as in the video below:

 

If you’re still having trouble with this problem, leave us a comment below and we’ll be happy to help you!