HP Laserjet 5000N

[danvan]

I am new to this forum - so 'hello!'

I have an HP Laserjet 5000N with 3 trays setup on our network

For some reason it has stopped pulling paper from trays 2 and 3. Even if you do printer setup to use e.g. tray 2 it still pulls from tray 1. If there is no paper in tray 1, it still tries.

No settings have changed and I am at a bit of a loss as to how to solve this problem. I did read on another website that it may have something to with the pickup sensor on tray 1 not releasing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Regards

Dan

[cs_steve]

You're probably on the right track with the paper sensor ... try toggling that sensor with your finger to make sure it isn't stuck in place ... what happens if you close Tray 1?

Also, make sure that the paper size settings for Tray 2 & Tray 3 are set for Letter (or whatever paper size you're trying to print) ...

[mixmaster]

Hi,

New at this but here's what I know.

You are encountering a couple of different things happening here. What's happening does sound like the Tray 1 paper sensor isn't working properly. Here's how to test that:

The HP LaserJet 5000's have a Diagnostic mode available through the control panel. Within that Diagnostic menu, there's an option for "Paper Path Sensors." Select that.

You'll find a row of letters and numbers. The numbers are 1s and 0s. This represents whether or not the photosensor is tripped.

I don't know which letter corresponds to the Tray 1 sensor, but if you toggle that arm, one of the numbers will change from "1" to "0" or vice versa.

What's happening to you:
The way most laserjets work is if there's paper in Tray 1 and it "fits" the required parameters of the print job, it will pull from that tray pretty much all the time. After that, it will then look at the bottom-most paper tray available (tray 3 in your case) and then move up. Weird, but that's how it works.

Because the Tray 1 paper present sensor is working, you'll need to change the setting for Tray 1. By default, it should be set to Any Size/Any Type.

You can change this by going to the Paper Handling Menu and changing the Tray 1 paper size to Com10 envelope or something like that. Like I said before, by default, its set to "Any Size." When you send a print job, there's a request for a particular paper size and/or type. If the job is looking for Letter size paper and Tray 1 is now set to Com10 Envelope, the processor will choose the next tray WITH letter paper.

Hopefully, this all makes sense. Good luck.