Anyone good with printers?

[BassTech]

We have a Panasoninc KX-CL500 colour printer here, the waste toner was full yesterday and a new one is hard to get ahold of being 8 Years old so I decided to empty it myself. After emptying it I've put it back in but the printer is still saying "WT FULL" and won't print.

I've looked through the printer menus and you can't reset the timer on the waste toner, I've also tried a factory reset with no luck. The wierd part is that the waster toner itself has no electronic chip to tell the printer it's full - its all mechanical so I'm puzzled as to how the printer is reporting it as full even after emptying it

 

Lee

[broc]

Some printers use an optical sensor to detect waste toner full. The sensor may be dirty, or the neck of the toner bottle is dirty?

[Achandler]

Agreed get a sponge or cloth (DRY) and wipe the sensor.

[dhicks]

the neck of the toner bottle is dirty?

 

Just to expand on that (because I had the photocopier engineer show me last week): you're looking for a small clear plastic window somewhere near the top of the waste toner cartridge that, when inserted into the printer, a light shines through to a sensor on the other side. If it's clogged up the light might not be able to shine through properly. As toner is designed to stick to surfaces via static attraction, once it gets filmed up with toner it might be quite hard to clear if you can't dissesmble to wipe it properly.

 

Also, some waste toner cartridges have a small sticky-outy bit of plastic somewhere on them that's designed to poke a sensor switch when inserted into the printer, telling the printer that it's present. This is generally about the first thing that gets broken off if someone's a bit heavy handed clearning jams or similar, so your printer might be reporting "cartridge full" when in fact there's a broken sensor-pokey bit.