HP L25500 "Replace Printhead"

[Tim Aucoin]

I actually "ditched" my L25500 for this exact issue. Tried fix after fix with nothing but frustration in return! Being out of warranty, service wanted to replace parts that would have cost me over $3000 including labour. That's when I decided to buy the L360. The L25500 had zero trade-in value and could not be sold on the open market in its current condition, so my supplier gave me $3500 worth of ink and media and 5 sets of ink for the L360 at half price. I thought that was a great deal. The L25500 was taken out by a scrap removal company and went to printer heaven! The L360 is leaps and bounds better in every way. 2+ years later, 5 sets of ink, and I'm still running the same print heads... This thing is a work-horse. I later heard service reps say that the L25500 had a "shelf life" of around 4 years. Anything beyond that was a bonus. Ours didn't owe us anything, so all was good.

 

[SellersSign&Design]

I'm trying not to let this change my mind about HP, but they are making it very hard. My new part came in yesterday, so when I got off work at the fire department this morning I went to the shop to fix the printer. When I opened up the box I found a bundle of nice new cables, not the carriage top cover and ribbon cables I needed. Long story short, I got confused when I was looking at HP's not so good schematics, and ordered the wrong part. So after spending 10 minutes trying to find a number to HP's parts department, I ended up calling the main number. I was transferred probably a total of 3 or 4 times, put on hold for around 20 minutes total and hung up on twice before I finally got to someone who could help me with returning the wrong part. Then they transferred me to sales so I could order the right one. She looked the part up, took all my information, and was then in the process of asking for my credit card when she told me the part is on backorder. I asked when they expected to get more in... and she told me 4-5 weeks. I explained to her that my printer is the heart of my business and I couldn't sit here twiddling my thumbs for 4-5 weeks waiting on them to send me a part to make it work again. So I called around and finally hopefully found one at a company in Texas, but they couldn't tell me for sure that they have it in stock because their computers were down. So... hopefully they have one on the shelf and will be sending it out tomorrow. The even better part of this story is while my big printer is down I figured I would catch up on other work that I have for my Gerber Edge. When I fired it up and sent a job to it a little while ago, it printed a blank piece of vinyl. Yep, its broken down too. Would anyone be interested in buying a sign business in North Carolina?? It comes complete with several boat anchors that used to be printers!

 

[BigfishDM]

I actually "ditched" my L25500 for this exact issue. Tried fix after fix with nothing but frustration in return! Being out of warranty, service wanted to replace parts that would have cost me over $3000 including labour. That's when I decided to buy the L360. The L25500 had zero trade-in value and could not be sold on the open market in its current condition, so my supplier gave me $3500 worth of ink and media and 5 sets of ink for the L360 at half price. I thought that was a great deal. The L25500 was taken out by a scrap removal company and went to printer heaven! The L360 is leaps and bounds better in every way. 2+ years later, 5 sets of ink, and I'm still running the same print heads... This thing is a work-horse. I later heard service reps say that the L25500 had a "shelf life" of around 4 years. Anything beyond that was a bonus. Ours didn't owe us anything, so all was good.

Tim who is the big HP dealer in your neck of the woods up there?

 

[SellersSign&Design]

I finally got the correct replacement part in today. I'm working on getting it swapped out, but I can't get these stupid "dummy" printheads out of the carriage. Does anyone have any tricks??

 

[SellersSign&Design]

Ok... I got the dummy heads out and swapped the new plate and cables in. Everything went smooth until I got to plugging the last ribbon cable in. The top right cable, for the LM/M heads was a nightmare to get in. I finally got it popped in, but it doesn't stay in. The little brown clip pops up like it should, but it's like it isn't putting enough pressure on the cable. So now the printer is telling me those two heads are missing. Is there a way to fix this, or do I need a new carriage PC board now?

 

[SellersSign&Design]

So here's a rundown on all of this for anyone who is following along... I bought the printer used, it worked great for a few months and then started telling me the #3 printhead needed to be replaced. I could pull it out and reseat it and it would work. Then it got worse and more frequent and finally wouldn't accept the head anymore. I ordered new ribbon cables and installed them a few days ago, and it was back up and running great. Now today I come in and send a job to it... and get the "replace printhead" prompt for the same #3 head. I can open it up and reseat it, it accepts it and goes through the "preparing print system" screen, but then goes right back to "preparing for printhead replacement". I don't get it?

 

[GP_Oz]

So here's a rundown on all of this for anyone who is following along... I bought the printer used, it worked great for a few months and then started telling me the #3 printhead needed to be replaced. I could pull it out and reseat it and it would work. Then it got worse and more frequent and finally wouldn't accept the head anymore. I ordered new ribbon cables and installed them a few days ago, and it was back up and running great. Now today I come in and send a job to it... and get the "replace printhead" prompt for the same #3 head. I can open it up and reseat it, it accepts it and goes through the "preparing print system" screen, but then goes right back to "preparing for printhead replacement". I don't get it?

Swap heads around. See if the problem moves with the head or stays in slot 3.

 

[SellersSign&Design]

I replaced the carriage PCA today and once it fired back up it took me back to the "replace printhead" screen. This time, it was showing the #4 YK head instead of the #3. I swapped the two heads and the problem moved to the #3 spot, so I figured that head was bad. I swapped in an old one that I had and it accepted it and went through the preparing print system screen. Then when it was preparing to print the printhead alignment plot, it popped up an error that said the image quality may be bad. I continued with the alignment print and it didn't print any black at all, except for maybe a few faint smudges. So... why am I not getting any black now?? The old printhead I put in may be clogged up, but shouldn't the other YK head at least be laying down some black?

 

[Romney]

Sellers...It is good that there are knowledgeable posters like 2ct at this site. If you wrote down the name of the HP Tech that told you to buy a new printer, you should send him a copy of 2ct's post so perhaps next time someone ask him the same question he will have a better answer.
I believe that HP does monitor this site, so I believe they will pass fix on to all the HP tech support folks.
BTW, I do believe HP has recently released a new "firmware" upgrade for the L25500 printers.

Good printing

What!? When and where?

 

[Tim Aucoin]

Tim who is the big HP dealer in your neck of the woods up there?

Just saw this! There are two up here who sell and service HP Equipment; ND Graphics and Grimco.

 

[CreatedDesigns]

Fix and enhancements:

- Enhanced supply management experience related to "Out of Ink," "Faulty ink cartridges" and "reseat X Cartridge" messages

new L25500 Firmware released Feb 3, 2017

 

[PJ758]

I have a Hp l25500 just bought a set of brand new heads and the lc/mg head keeps asking to be re-seat, clean the contacts with alcohol but that didn't work, updated the firmware to the recent one still didn't fix the problem, anyone have idea what should i do, do I return the head for a replacement ?

 

[SellersSign&Design]

I have a Hp l25500 just bought a set of brand new heads and the lc/mg head keeps asking to be re-seat, clean the contacts with alcohol but that didn't work, updated the firmware to the recent one still didn't fix the problem, anyone have idea what should i do, do I return the head for a replacement ?

Most likely the carriage cables or the carriage PCA are bad like what happened to me.