HP 342 Colour (C9361E)

Your cartridge is not actually empty. It has been remanufactured and the ink levels cannot be reset. Continue printing as normal until all of the ink is used.

The working parts of the printer and cartridge are delicate and need to be in the correct condition to function correctly. Sometimes a little dirt or ink can prevent the cartridge from working. Remove the cartridge from the printer and gently clean the gold coloured electrical contacts on the cartridge and the contacts on your printer with some moist tissue. Reinstall the cartridge and attempt to print again.

There may be air trapped in your cartridge’s printhead. Please run a cleaning cycle according to your printer’s instructions and try to print again.

There may be a small blockage in your cartridge’s printhead. Remove the cartridge and try wiping the printhead from back to front a few times with a moist tissue. You should soon see a black line or a three colour line on the tissue. Reinstall the cartridge and attempt to print again.

First check to make sure that you have removed the clip and/or tape from the cartridge before attempting installation. If you have, then make sure that your printer is listed in the ‘Compatible With’ section.

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 HP cartridges. The page yield displayed by HP 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 HP is unlikely to be the same page yield that you will get out of your cartridge.