HP Photosmart C8100 All-in-One won't print (Printer says "out of paper" but need to pull back the blue photo tray).

Mine's a C8180. Everything looks fine. You print a test page and the rollers spin for ten seconds or so and then a non-helpful message appears on the printer saying you're out of paper. Except you're not.

You RTFM. No help.

You go online to HP's troubleshooting guide for this exact problem and they have a detailed list of things to try except none of them fix the problem.

I figured this one out myself but if you look here somebody else did too

yoofah says:
30/08/2010 at 04:43

Another possible issue not identified in the video:
these printers are equipped with a blue “photo tray” in the main paper tray area. If this is pushed in, it’ll try to draw from that instead of the main train tray, causing this same type of error. The solution is to reach your head in, and pull out that blue tray until it is flush with the main tray.


Yeah, you need to pull that little blue photo tray back a few inches and - voila - the printer prints again. (I don't think yoofah meant to reach your head in - I think he/she meant reach your hand in - but then again, I had to do a little bit of both to figure it out myself.)

The problem here is that this 10 second fix for a problem that renders the printer non-operable is never mentioned in the manual (so RTFM does no good), not mentioned in the error message, and not mentioned in HP's online troubleshooting guide.

I post this here - hopefully someone may find it useful.



Comments

Anonymous said…
The blue photo paper tray in my C8180 has stopped engaging, meaning that after hitting the print command, blue tray does not move forward and thus the system does not "grab" the paper for print. I can however push the tray be hand into the print position and the system does print. On the flip side the blue tray does not disengage and I have to do so by hand. comments please.
June 29, 2011 at 10:01 AM
John Glotzer said…
I haven't looked at this recently. But I think this is the gist of my original blog post. You say that unless you push the blue tray in, the machine won't grab paper from the photo tray but if you push it in it will.

My original post was that if the blue tray was pushed in (in my case inadvertently probably because I had left it that way) it won't take paper from the regular tray. But when I pulled the tray out, it would (i.e. take paper from the regular tray).

This is, more or less, precisely my point. I'm not sure that this is a "bug" or a "feature" but it seems to be the way things work - so forewarned is forearmed.
July 1, 2011 at 7:22 AM
Leigh said…
my printer says photo tray problem says to push photo tray all the way in but still not working. i keep getting the same error message i am not trying to print photos just regular documents.
September 8, 2014 at 5:55 AM
Anonymous said…
Hi
Many thanks for your comments on this problem.
My printer said out of paper, paper jam, blue tray error.
I took the printer apart and put it together again, but not
util I read this comment about the photo tray the problem was solved.
I also placed a photosheet in the photo tray and that seemed to help also.
May 24, 2020 at 8:18 AM
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