Lexmark Supply & Imaging Error Codes (31.xx, 32.xx, 33.xx, 80.xx, 84.xx, 88.xx): Fixes

Lexmark's supply messages are a small, disciplined vocabulary: five families — 31, 32, 80, 84 and 88 — that between them report a cartridge that is missing or defective, a cartridge the printer refuses to accept, a fuser or maintenance kit at its scheduled end, an imaging unit at the end of its estimated life, and a toner cartridge running down its last pages. This guide works through each family in Lexmark's own published wording, including the places where two generations of Lexmark printers word the same family differently, and closes with the family that does not exist: 33.

How Lexmark names a supply problem

Every Lexmark supply message is built from the same three parts, and reading all three prevents the classic mistakes. The family — the digits before the dot — names the kind of problem: 31 is a supply the printer cannot use as installed, 32 is a supply the printer will not accept at all, 80 is the fuser or the maintenance schedule, 84 is the imaging side's life, 88 is toner quantity. The suffix and the display text then name the instance: the colour ([color] in Lexmark's own bracketed wording), the supply type (cartridge, imaging unit, imaging kit, waste toner bottle), or the life state (low, nearly low, missing, replace). And the verb in the message is the instruction: reinstall means take it out and put it back; replace missing means fit the absent part; replace unsupported means fit a different part; replace with '0 estimated pages remain' means the part's counted life is spent. Owners go wrong by collapsing these into a single 'toner problem': they order toner for a 31 that a reseat would clear, they reseat a 32 that only a different cartridge can clear, and they treat an 88's gentle 'low' as a stop or a stop-level 88 as a suggestion. Lexmark's documentation never collapses them — its guides keep the families in separate entries with separate procedures — and neither does this guide. One more structural fact frames everything below: Lexmark changed the wording of two families (80 and 84) between its classic xx.xx guides and its newer [xx.xy] guides, renaming the parts themselves (fuser to maintenance kit in the message text, photoconductor to imaging unit) while keeping the family numbers. The numbers are the continuity; the words are the generation marker.

31.xx: missing or defective — the reseat family

Lexmark's classic-table wording is '31.xx Missing or defective [color] cartridge', and its published procedure is a model of the family's logic: remove and reinstall the specified print cartridge, touch Continue to clear the message, and — if the message is not cleared — replace the defective print cartridge. The family is deliberately two-headed: missing covers the cartridge the printer cannot find (not fitted, or fitted so it does not register), and defective covers the cartridge it can find but cannot use. On newer models Lexmark splits the same family into supply-specific entries that say the quiet part aloud: reinstall missing or unresponsive cartridge [31.xy], replace missing cartridge [31.xy], replace defective imaging unit [31.xy], replace missing imaging unit or imaging kit [31.xy], and even replace missing waste toner bottle [31.xyz] — the family's reach extends to every removable supply the printer inventories, and the message always names which one. Lexmark's T640 support article for the sibling '31 Defective Cartridge' message adds the diagnostic order its field experience produced: in most cases the toner cartridge will be the cause of 31 errors, so check the cartridge before checking anything else — reseat it, try a known-good one — and only if a good cartridge cannot clear the error does the article open the printer to inspect the small two-wire CART cable on the system board, a step Lexmark itself flags as a customer-level procedure only for users comfortable performing it, with Lexmark Technical Support as the stated alternative. The discipline 31 teaches generalises across this guide: the supply is the prime suspect in its own message, the printer is the suspect of last resort, and the swap test — a second cartridge, ideally the previous one that worked — is the experiment that separates them in minutes.

32.xx: unsupported — the refusal family

Where 31 says 'this supply is not working', 32 says 'this supply is not allowed': Lexmark's wording is '[color] cartridge part number unsupported by device', and its procedure has no reseat branch — remove the unsupported print cartridge, install a supported one, and touch Continue. The newer guides word it as replace unsupported cartridge [32.xy] and replace unsupported imaging unit [32.xy], and they publish something rare in error documentation: the exact suffixes that identify a non-genuine supply — for toner cartridges 32.13, 32.16, 32.19, 32.22, 32.25, 32.28, 32.31, 32.34 and 32.37, and for imaging units the parallel sequence 32.14 through 32.38 — because Lexmark wants the owner to be able to tell 'non-Lexmark supply fitted' apart from every other 32 at a glance. The family is wider than counterfeits, though. Lexmark's MX810 guide warns that the error can also be caused by installing a genuine Lexmark cartridge that is not intended for the product — its example is a high-yield cartridge the model does not accept — or a genuine MICR imaging unit in a non-MICR product; region-mismatched cartridges belong to the same logic (Lexmark documents region matching explicitly in its 42.xy entry, where printer and cartridge region values must match). And Lexmark's unsupported-cartridge support article adds the refilled-cartridge case (a refilled or reworked cartridge can trigger the error, and its remedy is the refiller, not Lexmark) plus the isolation procedure: power off, reseat fully, and if the error persists fit the old or another known-compatible cartridge — if the error disappears with the second cartridge, the problem lies with the original cartridge. That last sentence is the family's whole troubleshooting philosophy in one line: 32 is a verdict on a specific cartridge, proven by substitution, and no printer-side setting changes it.

80.xx: fuser life on classic models, maintenance kit on newer ones

The 80 family is where Lexmark's generational wording change is impossible to miss, and both versions are published here with their scopes because owners of each generation meet the same digits wearing different sentences. In the classic guides (the X792 and C925 era) 80 is the fuser's own family, in four stages: 80.xx Fuser near life warning and 80.xx Fuser life warning as the advance notices, 80.xx Replace fuser as the instruction, and 80.xx Fuser missing as the odd one out — the printer reporting no fuser detected, which on a machine that has not been serviced means a seating or detection problem rather than a life problem. Still older Lexmark documentation wears the same family in display shorthand — the '80 Fuser Exhausted / 80 Fuser Life Warning' wording of the T-series era, with Press Go to clear the reminder and the Supplies menu showing the standing messages. In the newer guides (the MX810 and XC2132 era) the message text changes hands: 80 becomes the scheduled-maintenance family, worded replace maintenance kit [80.xy] and replace maintenance kit, 0 estimated pages remain [80.xy], with Lexmark's explanation being simply that the printer is scheduled for maintenance — the maintenance kit being the service bundle (fuser and its companion wear parts) that a representative fits at the interval — while replace missing fuser [80.xx] keeps the missing-fuser report inside the family. The owner's behaviour differs by wording, and Lexmark says so in its own text: a life warning is planning information (order, schedule, keep printing); a replace-fuser or 0-pages-remain maintenance message is a service booking ('contact support.lexmark.com or your service representative, and report the message'); and any 80 reading on a printer whose fuser or kit was just replaced is a counter or seating question for the person who replaced it, not a second kit. What never changes across generations is the referent: 80 is always the hot end of the printer and its scheduled wear, never the toner, never the imaging unit — those have 88 and 84 respectively.

84.xx: photoconductor on classic colour models, imaging unit on newer ones

The 84 family reports the life of the part that carries the image — and it underwent the same renaming as 80, one component over. In the classic colour guides, 84 is the photoconductor family, stated per colour: 84.xx [color] photoconductor, nearly low and 84.xx [color] photoconductor, low as the warnings, 84.xx [color] photoconductor, missing as the detection report, and 84.xx Replace [color] photoconductor as the instruction. In the newer guides the same family is worded for the imaging unit or imaging kit: replace imaging unit, 0 estimated pages remain [84.xy], and replace [type] imaging kit, 0 estimated pages remain [84.xy] — with Lexmark's note that the type can be a black imaging kit or a black and colour imaging kit, which is the suffix-and-display discipline of this whole guide working as designed. The family's kinship with 31 is worth seeing: a defective or missing imaging unit can also be reported inside the 31 family on newer models (replace defective imaging unit [31.xy], replace missing imaging unit [31.xy]), because 31 is the 'supply not usable as installed' family and 84 is the 'imaging supply's life is spent' family — the same physical part, reported by two different systems for two different reasons. The owner-facing consequence: an 84 is settled by replacement, following the instruction sheet that came with the supply, and Lexmark's wording in both generations is exactly that; a missing-wording 84 on a unit that is visibly fitted earns one reseat before the replacement is ordered; and a nearly-low or low 84 is the order-ahead stage, the imaging equivalent of toner running low, not a stopped printer. Colour discipline applies as it does in 88: replace the colour or kit the message names, and only that one.

88.xx: the toner-low scale, nearly low to zero pages

The 88 family is Lexmark's fuel gauge, and its guides publish the whole scale rather than a single low warning. In the classic tables it runs 88.1x [color] cartridge nearly low, 88.xx [color] cartridge low, 88.xx [color] cartridge critically low, and 88.2x Replace [color] cartridge; the newer guides compress the display text but keep the scale, carrying the message topic cartridge low [88.xy] and the terminal form replace [color] cartridge, 0 estimated pages remain [88.xy]. The suffixes in the classic form even encode the stage — the 88.1x block is the nearly-low stage and the 88.2x block is the replace stage — which makes 88 the family's clearest demonstration of this site's numbering rule: family for the system, suffix for the instance, display text for the colour. Behaviour follows stage. Nearly low and low are procurement signals: have the named colour's replacement on the shelf, keep printing, and expect the stages to arrive in order as the cartridge's counted life runs down (Lexmark's guides link the message to the ordering information for exactly this reason). Critically low is the last warning in which printing quality and continuity are still the printer's problem to manage. At Replace, or 0 estimated pages remain, Lexmark's procedure is the family's only verb: replace the indicated toner cartridge to clear the message and continue printing, per the instruction sheet with the supply. Two confusions the family attracts deserve direct answers. An 88 is not a 31: the cartridge is present, recognised and working — it is emptying, not missing or defective — so reseating it changes nothing but the clock. And an 88 names one colour: a cyan 88.2x authorises one cyan cartridge, and the black cartridge's silence in the same week is information, not an oversight. The family's staging also answers the most common 88 question — why the message arrived 'early', with prints still looking full and dark. Lexmark's scale is driven by the cartridge's estimated remaining life (its terminal message says so in words: 0 estimated pages remain), and an estimate is a prediction built from consumption so far, not a dipstick reading of powder in the cartridge. A cartridge spent on dense graphics will reach its stages sooner in page terms than one spent on memos, and a printer that warns while the current pages still look rich is doing exactly what a staged gauge exists to do: warning while the warning is still useful. The test of an 88 is never the look of today's page — it is whether the stages keep arriving in Lexmark's order, nearly low, low, critically low, replace, which only a genuinely running-down cartridge produces.

The family that is not there: 33.xx and other honest gaps

This guide ends where Lexmark's table does — with an absence that third-party lists routinely paper over. There is no 33.xx family in any Lexmark User's Guide message table checked for this guide: the classic tables (X792, C925, X746/X748) and the newer ones (MX810, XC2132) all run 31.xx missing or defective, 32.xx unsupported, and then 34, the paper-size family. Whatever 33 may have meant in a Lexmark context this batch did not reach — a single model's service documentation, an obsolete generation — no Lexmark user document in this batch's sources publishes it, so this guide names 33.xx here, without a meaning, rather than inventing the plausible-sounding 'replace unsupported imaging unit' style entry that content sites attach to it (that meaning, in Lexmark's real tables, lives inside 32.xy). Two neighbouring families deserve the same honest mention. The 82 and 83 families do exist in Lexmark's classic indexes — 82.yy covers the waste toner box/bottle (replace, missing, nearly full) and 83.xx the transfer module (life warning, replace, missing) — and waste-toner reports also appear inside the newer 31 family as replace missing waste toner bottle [31.xyz]; they are noted here as documented neighbours, outside this guide's five-family scope, rather than silently absorbed into it. And the 30.xx family (missing [color] cartridge and/or imaging unit) that opens some classic tables stands as the 31 family's immediate predecessor in wording — again, documented, adjacent, and not interchangeable with 31. The working rule for any Lexmark supply number this guide has not covered is the one Lexmark's own structure teaches: trust the display text that accompanies the number, work the family the digits actually name, and let an undocumented number stay undocumented until Lexmark — not a listicle — publishes it.

Key takeaways

• Read all three parts of the message — family, suffix, and the display's own words (colour/supply/state): Lexmark prints the words because they are part of the code, and the fix differs by verb (reinstall 31, substitute 32, replace 84/88).
• Use the swap test Lexmark itself prescribes: fit the old or a known-compatible cartridge — if the error follows the cartridge, the cartridge is the fault; if it stays with the printer, it is time to talk to Lexmark.
• Match the generation before matching the part: 80 and 84 mean fuser/photoconductor parts on classic models and maintenance-kit/imaging-unit parts on newer ones — the family number is the same, the box you order is not.

Resetting the Lexmark printer

Lexmark's documented reset for a standing error is the power-on reset (POR) its service literature names: turn the printer off, and for the service families (900-999, 841-846) Lexmark's User's Guide procedure adds the full form — unplug the power cord from the wall outlet, check all cable connections, connect the power cord to a properly grounded outlet, and turn the printer back on; if the service message appears again, contact Customer Support and report the message. For the 920-family Service Fuser errors, Lexmark's support articles specify the lighter form first: power off, leave the printer off ten seconds or more to give it a chance to reset, power on, and if it reaches Ready and the error does not return, continue printing while watching for recurrence over the next few days. Supply messages (31/32/80/84/88) are not reset at all in Lexmark's documentation — they clear when the named action happens (the cartridge reseated or replaced, the maintenance kit serviced), and the guides' Continue touch is an acknowledgement that lets the printer proceed where the message allows it, not a counter reset. Lexmark publishes no user 'factory reset the error away' procedure for these families, and its menus' Restore Factory Defaults (an administrative settings function in the guides) is documented as restoring settings, not as an error cure — a distinction worth keeping, because a POR that clears a code temporarily is Lexmark's evidence the fault is intermittent, not evidence the fault is gone.

Related guides

Facts on this page were checked against manufacturer documentation: publications.lexmark.com · publications.lexmark.com · publications.lexmark.com · publications.lexmark.com · publications.lexmark.com · publications.lexmark.com · support.lexmark.com · support.lexmark.com · support.lexmark.com · support.lexmark.com · www.manualslib.com · infoserve.lexmark.com · www.manualshelf.com