"How to - Fix HP Photosmart 7350 Carriage Stuck"

By Ron Stultz

28 January 2010

Updated: 14 October 2011

Summary: in the end, seems to be caused by lack of printer use. Run a goodly number of paper sheets through printer and it should free up.

Background:

Daughter upgrading to wireless printer and gave me HP Photosmart 7350. As years newer than my old HP and used ink cartridges I already had, installed 7350 on my personal computer (PC).

All worked fine for a while and then in a ink cart change, I accidentally left tape over electrical contacts on one cartridge and when top cover closed, printer carriage jammed and green circular light on front of printer began flashing brown. Crap.

Opened top cover and ink cartridges moved to center like they should. Removed tape from one cartridge, reinserted and thought all was fine, but no, next time I went to print, blinking circular light and message that carriage stuck and remove paper jam.

No paper jam.

Press "OK" button and printer prints what I want. OK.

But printer sets for some period of time and try to print something and once again, flashing circular and carriage stuck message. Pressing "OK" button will make printer work but this just not satisfactory.

Solution:

HP website for solution and get lengthily list of things to try. All work at the time but wait an hour or more and when I go to print, same old song of stuck carriage.

Finally, stumbled upon this, which is sort of a solution (definitely a design problem with 7350):

- turn off printer.

- unplug power adapter from back of printer.

- unplug power adapter from wall outlet. (No idea why this has to be done but just does.)

- reattach printer to power adapter.

- connect power adapter to house power.

- turn on printer.

Printer now will be fine until next time house power drops out for any reason and then have to repeat above to get printer to work properly. Too bad printers can not have a firmware update like so many other devices. Sure could use an update to fix this annoying problem.

Update 14 October 2011:

Not sure above will solve your problem or not.

In the end, think the problem was related to printer having sit unused for a very long time.

Once I started using printer regularly, stuck issue went away.