Sandy wrote:
In article , Tony
wrote

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.
...
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

Dear Tony,

This is very kind of you. Function 80 gives me the serial number of
the machine. Are you sure you meant 80?

With kind regards,

Sandy
--
Alexander Anderson
(Yorkshire, England)

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Ah, sorry Sandy, my instructions were incomplete....
See here -

Fisrstly enter maintenance mode, then
(1) Press the 8 and 0 keys in this order in the initial stage of the
maintenance mode.
The USB serial number appears on the LCD.
(2) Press the Fax Start key. Each time the Fax Start key is pressed, one of the
following log
information items appears on the LCD in the order given below.
1) Ink cartridge drop count, indicating how many droplets have been jetted out
from each of
the ink cartridges (Note 1)
2) Ink drop count after near-empty, indicating how many droplets have been
jetted out from
each of the ink cartridges (Note 1) after the ink empty sensor detects
near-empty
3) Total ink drop count, indicating how many droplets the equipment has jetted
out
from each of the ink cartridges (Note 1) since produced
4) Jam count, indicating how many times a paper jam has been occurred
5) Total page count, indicating how many pages have been printed since the
equipment was
produced
6) PC print page count, indicating how many pages the equipment has printed as
an
output device of the connected PC
7) Copy page count, indicating how many copies have been made
8) FAX page count, indicating how many received FAX pages have been printed
9) Purge count, indicating how many times the purge operation has been carried
out
10) Wiper count, indicating how many times the wiper operation has been carried
out
11) Ink cartridge change count, indicating how many times ink cartridge
replacement has been
made for each color (Note 1)
12) Error code of the most recent machine error (Note 2)
13) Error code of the most recent communications error (Note 3)
14) ADF jam count, indicating how many times a document jam has occurred
15) ADF page count, indicating how many documents have been fed
16) Flat-bed page count, indicating how many documents have been scanned

To stop this operation and return the equipment to the initial stage of the
maintenance
mode, press the Stop key.

Note 1 - To check each of the four ink cartridges, press the Menu key. Pressing
the key cycles through
black, yellow, cyan, and magenta.
Note 2 - When a machine error code is displayed, pressing the Menu key cycles
through recent nine
errors that have occurred.
Note 3 - When a communications error code is displayed, pressing the Menu key
cycles through the
latest 3 errors.

Item 12 (see note 2) may give us some clues. It will probably only give error
code numbers but I can tell you what they mean (there are dozens of different
error codes).
Good luck
Tony