Canon Printer U052 Error Fix

Yesterday I sent two pages from Microsoft Word via WiFi to our Canon MG5250 printer.

It printed fine and so I carried on working!

I then sent one more page to print fifteen minutes later and an error message popped up on the screen and said to see printer for details.

So I wheeled through to the dining room where the printer is located and saw the above error message.

I was confused and pissed off because for 7 years we have been using this printer and it is the same print head, so how can it be saying it is the wrong type of print head?

So I did what we all would do and asked Google!

The main opinion was that I should do the following

Power off the printer from the plug!

And yes before anyone comments saying I don’t have the original Canon inks installed, I couldn’t afford to run a printer with those prices. I have always used 3rd party inks without any problem for the last 7 years and these inks cost £15.99 for 17 High Yield ink cartridges. 5 x PGI-525 Black, 3 x CLI-526 Black, 3 x Cyan, 3 x Magenta and 3 x Yellow. >CLICK FOR LINK< These inks have even performed well when printing photos!

On the rear of the print head is a printed circuit board containing multiple contacts that is how the printer sends the info to the head.

The advice is to clean these contacts, now this can be done with isopropyl if you have some, but vodka is okay to use and I used a cotton bud to clean them.

Then return the print head to the printer, close the grey handle and put the inks back in. Power up the printer and wait for it to cycle and then according to the advice given, it should work!

But that seems to be a slim chance as many have said they can’t get the error cleared and the crazy thing is that you can’t even use the scanner anymore

I tried taking out the print head multiple times and cleaned it again and again in the hope that I could revive our up till now trusty printer, but alas cleaning it, swearing at it and even hitting the printer did not work!

People have said they even tried buying a new print head and still the error was showing.

I contacted Canon UK & Ireland via Twitter and they suggested booking a service, when I finished laughing I told them that the cost of a service for a home user like me would not be cost effective and we are skint anyway.

I can get a similar Canon printer for £59.96 and I am sure that Canon would charge a lot more than that to send one of their service guys round to try and fix a 7 year old printer!

There are cheaper printers for sale but my advice is always buy a printer that has seperate inks like in the photo above. Some have only 2 ink cartridges, one black and one colour and that is not cost effective in the long run. You will always use up one colour more quickly than the others and so replacing a whole colour cartridge when just one colour has run out is very wasteful. It is much easier and cost effective to be able to replace each colour seperately!

So my fix has been to verbally abuse the printer with several “fuck you” and “you piece of shit” rants and chuck it out the back door and add the Canon PIXMA TS5050 to my Amazon Wish List and hope that sometime in the next year we can afford it. (that was a joke, we can’t!)