I have been having some very frustrating problems recently with my almost brand-new (one month old) Brother MFC-495CW Wireless all-in-one color printer. One day, I choked the power bar because the computer was frozen, and when I turned the power bar back on, the printer went
“BEEP BEEP BEEEEP”.
I got up and went to look at the printer, and what do I see? This stupid message:
Just. Great. I tried reinstalling the cartridge slowly, and I close the cartridge door, and what do I hear? “BEEP BEEP BEEP”. Oh, what now?. I look at the printer again, and it says “Cannot print” on the screen. Great, now the ink has magically disappeared. I try all sorts of things, unplugging the printer, trying to clean the cartridges, and even removing ALL the cartridges and putting them back in. The latter resulted in all the cartridges except for the magenta to become empty as well.
A few days later, I am fed up and decide to call Brother Customer Service. After about 18 minutes of being on hold, I talk to some one. I tell them my issue, and they are about to tell me that they don’t know the answer, and I should take it to a technician, I suggest a ‘Hard Reset”. This lets me in on a small secret about this printer: The maintenance mode (I will explain how to get into maintenance mode at the end of the post). I do what the tell me to reset the printer, but to no avail. Then they tell me the inevitable, which is that I must take it to a “Qualified Brother technician”.
For the record, the phone representative told me something that was inconsistent with what the Owner’s Manual said, which was that the printer uses a sensor to detect ink, instead of simply counting the amount of ink used since the cartridge was installed to determine the current ink level. If that was the case, a hard reset should almost certainly fix it.
The call ends, and I sit there wondering what else I can do. I decide to look at the one functioning cartridge: The Magenta (or ‘pinkish-red’) cartridge. I notice a small clear ‘window’ on the front of the cartridge. It has a small amount of pinkish-red ink in it. I look at the other cartridges, they all have the same window, but there is no ink.
Right now, it may seem that the printer is right, and there is no ink in there. But there is, and the cartridge is just designed so that the ink appears to the printer to ‘run out’ before it is actually empty. Now for the solution:
I decided to use some black electrical tape to cover up the cartridges’ small ‘window’, so the printer would see it as full. Here is an image of the window:And here is the window with some electrical tape over it:
I did the same thing for all the other cartridges that weren’t working, and the problem is now fixed! As a side note, you may have noticed that in the first image, of the error on the screen only the black cartridge had an error. This is because I only had the idea of posting this tutorial on my blog AFTER fixing the other two cartridges. Anyway, here is the ink volume screen after this fix:
Now, the printer thinks that all the cartridges are full. Beware though, I have heard that is not good to run the printer on a cartridge that has only air inside it, as it may damage the print head. So after applying this fix, replace the ink cartridges when you notice the ink quality is beginning to degrade.
Now, the maintenance mode:
To get into maintenance mode with this printer, while the printer is on hold down the menu button. Now, unplug the printer, and DO NOT take your finger off the button. With your finger still on the button, plug the printer back in. When the printer displays “MAINTENANCE” on the screen, you may remove your finger. To use maintenance mode, enter one of these codes, and press BLACK START. To exit, type in 99.
01 Full RAM clear (see 91 below for retaining user programming)
02 scanner initialize (feed a white sheet, then a black sheet)
05 white level
09 print test
10 modify soft switches
11 print configuration list
16 panel test
19 CML test
20 signal test
21 tonal test
23 filter RX
54 scan edge
55 scanner area
66 test print memo
75 display drum life (if enabled on laser models)
76 reset drum life counter (laser models)
91 parameter initialize (user programming remains intact)
95 protection
99 Exit maintenance mode
Thank you for reading this tutorial, and please tell me if you don’t understand something I said.
