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Posted to comp.periphs.printers,sci.electronics.repair
Tony
 
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Default Brother MFC-890 and "PLS OPEN COVER"

Sandy wrote:
Dear people,

I have a Brother MFC-890 multi-function machine (you know - printer,
copier, scanner, faxer, and digital picture printer).

It's been absolutely fine for about a year. (Yeah, the warranty
year.)

But all of a sudden now, when trying to print out Christmas cards
(based on a jpeg in Paint Shop Pro) it has gone hooey. It now has a
problem with printing big images. (It's not only from Paint Shop Pro.)
It still prints texts without problems.

Now, if you hold down the "Menu/Set" button as you power up the MFC,
you get into Maintenance Mode. A whole bunch of (very intriguing)
features accessed by two digit codes. You can get cryptic print-outs of
all sorts of data held by the machine's memory. The total number of
pages printed, the number of (billions!) of dots it's done, the number
of hours it been on, etc. Entering the digits "82" -- as per the
instructions of the not so useful UK Brother Helpdesk -- gives you the
machine error code. In this case it yields: "MACHINE ERROR 00". "99"
exits maintenance mode.

One in five times, it might print out the Christmas card without a
hitch. The rest of the time, it's forever cleaning itself -- all the
colours -- and rapidly depleting the ink cartridges. Hand in hand with
this, it randomly asks to "PLS OPEN COVER", beeps, and waits. The only
thing to do is to open the cover. It then immediately tells you "PLS
CLOSE COVER" and, well ... in two weeks, I've got 4 out of 30 Christmas
cards done.

Now, it being 2005, the first intuition that comes to one's mind is:
this is a deliberately designed firmware "failure mode", which kicks in
around the time the years warranty expires, designed to get you to waste
lots of money on inks for a while, and then to be told (by some poor sap
reading from a helpdesk script) that a service centre must "fix" it, for
a whole lot more. In more honest times, this was called a "protection
racket".

I'd love to find out that, in this case, this is not the problem.

Can anyone shed light on the matter, or share a similar experience
and its outcome?

With kind regards,

Sandy

P.S. For the first time ever, when copying just now, it has done the
"PLS OPEN COVER" crap. It also started cleaning itself before every run
of copies. And why am I copying? Yes, it's to complete 30 copies of
those Christmas cards! O Brother where art thou??!
--
Alexander Anderson
(Yorkshire, England)

Where there is no vision, the people perish.



Hmmm a trifle irritating to say the least.
What is supposed to happen is when you open the cover and close it again you
will get a machine error code that indicates what went wrong, or you will get
no code which means the error was transient and went away. Helpful eh?
What is probably happening is there has been a transient error.
If you go to maintenance mode and enter function 80 you should get a display of
the machine log, that may hopefully give you some machine error messages if it
does then post them here and I will try to translate for you.
Tony