Brother LC985 Cyan

First, check that the cartridge you have is compatible with your printer by making sure it is one of the printers listed in the ‘Compatible With’ section.

Once this is done, try removing the cartridge and then re-installing it, firmly but slowly. Sometimes installing an inkjet too quickly will cause an error due to the detection system between the printer and cartridge. This issue can occur with both original and remanufactured Brother ink cartridges.

Remove the cartridge from the printer and while the printer is still on, remove the power by switching off the printer at the socket. Leave the printer for 10 minutes to allow all power to drain and the error to clear.

After 10 minutes, switch your printer back on and firmly but slowly install the cartridge.

If the steps in the answers to the previous two questions do not solve your problem, re-install all your old, working cartridges. Then replace them with your new cartridges one by one to identify which colour cartridge is causing the error.

These Brother cartridges are just a tank with ink inside, all the technology for transferring the ink from the cartridge to your paper is held within the print heads inside your printer. So long as there are no error messages displayed, the issue is with the printer itself.

Try doing a couple of head or nozzle cleans on your printer through the status monitor on your computer or the display screen on your printer. This will help clear any air bubbles that may be trapped and blocking your normal print.

Printer manufacturers often use the roll out of their printer firmware updates to prevent you from choosing the origin and type of supplies you use in your printer. This has been done is ways such as blocking the use of remanufactured/recycled cartridges entirely, applying a 'cartridge lock' system that locks a cartridge's usage to a printer and introducing a new 'generation' of the same cartridge model to stop older, remanufactured cartridges being re-used.

Most printer manufacturers will prefer you to set your printer to automatically download and install their updates for this very reason. We suggest that you disable the automatic update option to allow you to continue to use remanufactured cartridges and also to recycle your cartridge after it has been used. By allowing your printer to update the firmware automatically you are risking being locked into only using the more expensive and less environmentally friendly original branded cartridges.

This is true for both original and remanufactured Brother cartridges. The page yield displayed by Brother is based on a 5% page coverage life test. That is, if you only fill 5% of your page, your cartridge will print for the given number of pages. If you print photos, graphics or even a full page of text, you will be using more than a 5% page coverage. So with normal everyday printing, the page yield listed by Brother is unlikely to be the same page yield that you will get out of your cartridge.