Tag: hack

If you are like me, you bought your Brother scanner printer because you wanted a decent scanner and perhaps the odd black and white print.  Nothing more.  That’s why you didn’t pay a lot.

Well, built into the ‘cheap printer’ business model at Brother is a nasty little trick which says ‘When their colour cartridge runs out (which is really small) then stop printer from printing *everything* – including black and white – even though it’s full!”

Now that is just dirty.

I turned off colour printing on computer and it still refused to print with some bogus message like ‘cannot maintain print quality’.  Really?  I have a fully black and white cartridge and I’m not printing colour and it cannot maintain print quality?  I call BS, Brother.

Thankfully, the solution was super, duper crazy easy.  Thanks very much to these guys here

Just take some electricians tape (don’t bother with sharpie markers or other ideas as I tried other stuff on my desk) and get some small scissors (or exacto knife probably easier and more accurate) and cut some black electricians tape so that the tape *perfectly* covers the plastic clear window.

Note: you can see a small gap in this photo example which you should avoid.  Aim for 100% coverage of the window or it may not work.  I tried one with a slightly larger gap and it failed (their lasers are very accurate!)

Once the lasers kick in and hit the tap your screen will show a nice full cartridge and printing in Black and white (or whatever colour you have left) should work.

Enjoy!

So you have an ink cartridge and Brother decided that it was empty and you disagree and want to milk it further?  One thing that might work for you is to reset the internal page counter.

It’s fairly public understanding that printer companies have tech inside the machines that essentially tell it when it has printed enough and to print no more (so you have to run out and buy another cartridge).  The screen will tell you ‘can’t maintain print quality’ or ‘cannot print’ or some message that you might not care about.

This post is specifically how to do it on the following models but I will have links to websites that will probably be able to solve your other models too:

MFC-J460DW

MFC-JF480DW

MRC-J485DW

The answer to my question was found tucked away in one reply somewhere on this page and on THIS WEBSITE

Here is the quote:

To enter maintenance mode on the MFC-J480DW, with the printer powered on, press the Settings button followed by *2864
The Settings button will have different names according to where you purchased your printer. To help identify the button: It depicts a wrench and a screw driver.

However!  One tiny little detail cost me many hours.  It’s important that before you do the above make sure you hit the ‘stop’ button which will clear the ‘ink levels low’ message from the LCD.  You can’t do the above steps until the LCD is clear of the warning.

So, here is a more clear list:

1. clear the screen with the stop/exit button
2. hit the settings button (wrench)
3. enter the following 5 keys * 2 8 6 4
4. use the down arrow until you come to the purge followed by some numbers (the numbers, btw, are your page count -wasted time trying to figure out why mine was different from websites out there, ha)
5. press 2 7 8 3
6. I got a ‘cannot detect’ message, and the stop/exit button didn’t work so then I did step 7 and got out
7. press 9 and then 9 again
8. machine reboots and page count is clear /purged

You may also get a message that says your colour cartridges are low and your printer stops you printing, even black and white!  Don’t worry, I overcame this trick too in THIS POST if you’d like to have a black and white only brother printer (works for me!)