Fix It! HP Officejet Pro 8600 Won't Print Photos

Picture it...you're a proud parent with access to a decent printer, high quality photo paper, and pictures of your adorable baby that absolutely have to be printed with no questions asked.  So you fire up that printer, load up your high quality, costs-an-absurd-amount-of-money photo paper, select the photo of your baby that you painstakingly adjusted, tweaked, and edited to Hell and back, and press print.

Suddenly, the printer whirs to life, things are moving, and you get that flutter of butterflies in your stomach like you cast a magical spell that would make Merlin himself envious.  A minute goes by, everything is still whirring away.  You're a little nervous now.  What could be going on?  Is it thinking about how best to capture the magic of my baby?  Is it even capable of capturing the grandeur of my baby?

Suddenly, you're pulled from your musings by the tell-tale chime of error.  Then this monstrosity pops up on your screen.

Out of paper?!  Are you kidding me?!  You gigantic piece of technological garbage!  I don't care if you've given me years of flawless service!  How dare you refuse to acknowledge that I loaded the very best paper into your insatiable gullet!

It's okay.  Take a deep breath.  Relax.  We'll hold hands and get through this together.

The problem lies with the rollers in charge of grabbing the paper.  It doesn't matter if the printer just came out of the box or if, like mine, it's been printing reliably for years.  The rollers in charge of feeding the paper don't have a strong enough grip to grab the heavier photo paper.  

The fix that worked for me was to set a blank piece of paper on the scanner and set it to make 100 copies.  This runs the paper through the rollers, essentially getting them warmed up.  From there, the printer is able to grab the heavier photo paper and print the picture.  Note, this is not a permanent fix.  When I tried to print pictures the next day, I had to repeat the process.

It's a less than ideal situation, but I won't argue with the quality of the prints that come out.  And making the copies only takes a few extra minutes.  It's not the end of the world, but it's something that HP hopefully resolves with their next series of printers.