
Thanks, HP! As usual, your dedication to obscure, hard-to-locate functionality does you proud. The printer will then reset everything, including the JetDirect card, and spend a few minutes (longer than usual) performing a calibration.
Press the down arrow until you get to COLD RESET, then press the green GO button. Keep holding until all three control panel LEDs are lit up and stay lit. Hold down the green GO button, and power the printer on. For that, you need the mystical COLD RESET. True, they were at their defaults when the printer left the factory, but there are a lot of other internal variables that won’t be reset to how they were at the factory if you rely on this procedure. All it does it reset the configuration options to their defaults. You see, on an HP printer, FACTORY RESET doesn’t mean ‘reset everything to how it was at the factory’. Nothing helped, but I soon discovered it was the factory reset option that had been my downfall.
I tried the usual tricks of power-cycling, performing a factory reset from the printer menu, and even pulling the formatter board and reseating it, as per some guidance from the HP forums. All of these are supposed to be a shade of blue: If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably already spotted the odd shades in the top-right of each group.