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I recently acquired a Pixus MP990 Canon Printer. It is from Japan (hence the "Pixus" rather than "Pixma"). It's been working well, however I just had to change an ink cartridge today, and every time I attempt to do so I get a u140 "ink tank cannot be recognized" error. These are genuine Canon ink cartridges purchased from Canon's USA website.

Is a region issue causing the rejection, and if so is there a way to change the region of the printer to the US?

Is there anything else I can do?

(I have made sure it's not the physical connection that is the problem - I've tried two different ink cartridges in their respective slots, and I still get the same problem.)

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3 Answers

If you contact the Canon support guys they will talk you through changing the region. Don't allow them to fob you off, they did it for one of my printers which was sourced in the USA and is now located in the UK.

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According to them, it's not possible to change the region. I'm going to try and return the ink for a refund. Region locked ink is kind of a WTF moment for me though - do all of the printer companies do this? –  QRohlf Dec 8 '10 at 22:40
HP are the only other company I have personal experience of that do this. I would hope it's to comply with some local laws regarding the make up of the inks but it's probably related to profit somehow. –  Tog Dec 9 '10 at 13:18
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up vote 1 down vote accepted

I managed to change the printer region, but the region-locking appears to go deeper than that - even with the US region set, the printer still wouldn't accept the US cartridges. My final (short-term) solution was to pry the chips off the Japanese ink and swap them with the chips on the US ink, then put the full US ink cartridges (which now had the Japanese chips) into the printer one by one, disabling the ink counter for each cartridge. Not a good long-term solution (I plan on ditching this printer after I go through this load of ink.)

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I have to disagree. I was trying to reset print counter via factory/service mode and I accidentally managed to make my pixma 310 to be JPN model. So my inks are definitely not working at the moment... I have to find out the pattern to change the region again.

Edit: This worked for me http://www.wasteink.co.uk/change-language-mp830/

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That link gets me into service mode = idle, but pressing stop/reset 5 times doesn't do anything. –  QRohlf Dec 16 '10 at 4:40
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