Recently you shifted to a different country and you suddenly finds that the new cartridge you purchased for your lovely HP printer does not print at all. What the Hell, you always believe in genuine products so you get only genuine accessories by selling out huge money ( HP ink is the costliest liquid in the world), but this insane printer does not print.  Do not get surprised in such a scenario as both the printer as well as your new cartridge are fine. The reason it is not printing is because of a technology called pen regionalization used by HP to prevent piracy.

HP has divided its marketing into four regions or zones. New Zealand is under Zone 1 whereas London is under Zone 2. The All-in-Ones purchased in zone 1 would also work fine in zone 2 till the pre-shipped ink cartridges of the All-in-One run. Once they ran out of ink, and you buy a new cartridge in a different zone, you will have issues with printing or the printer will not response even if you have a full cartridge. To make the All-in-One work with the regional (zone 2) cartridges it needs to be regionalized. The process is called as “Pen Regionalization”. Another thing, let me inform you that the All-in-One can be regionalized for only three times. The third time you regionalize the All-in-One, it will accustomed to that particular region.

So if you buy a HP 338 catridge in London which comes in Zone 2, you will require to do pen initialization in order to be able to use this catridge with the All in One purchased in Zone 1.

Remember: We can regionalize the printer only 3 times in it’s whole lifetime.

Steps to regionalize:

Do the following steps to regionalize your All in One:

To regionalize the printer we need to keep both the cartridges of any one zone. We cannot use a mix of cartridges from both the zone. So, it is suggested you replace both the zone 1 cartridges with two new Zone 2 cartridges.

For example:

Black inkjet print cartridge: HP 338 or HP 336 ( They differ only in content of ink )

Tri-color inkjet print cartridge: HP 342 or HP 343 ( They differ only in content of ink )

Please, perform the following steps to to print a 10-Tap test page.

1. Press and hold the Cancel / Resume button, then press the Start Copy Color button.
2. Release the buttons. The 10-Tap test prints. You should be seeing a printed page with following type of information:

PX values from line 16
PX values from line 53
PX values from line 63
RX value from line 25 in the page.
Line 11 SN,
Line 21 PG,
Line 52 ID,
Line 62 ID,
Line 26 RC value.

Please contact HP support with the details of the 10 tap test page and they will do the rest of the things to reset it.