Printer Is Fine But...

[anaxcrosswords]

...it isn't.

It's a Kodak ESP 5200 which is about 2 years old. Hasn't been used to print anything for about a month, and now it refuses to play ball. For reference, it's a model with separate cartridges, 1 black and 1 colours.
Ink levels are fine, about one third full. I've run the usual maintenance things and in terms of warning lights and doom messages there is absolutely nothing wrong.
But when I come to print something - pretty much blank pages. The oddest thing is it can't make up its mind what it wants to fail at.
PRINT 1: Totally blank pages.
PRINT 2: It reproduced some red.
PRINT 3: Just blue and yellow.
PRINT 4: Just black, but very faint.

Before I throw it out of the window, go downstairs and jump up and down on it, has anyone had a similar thing happen, to this or any other printer? According to the printer itself, everything is tickety-boo.

[Tilly2]

Buy some new cartridges.

[Buenchico]

Run the head cleaning utility. (If there's a 'deep clean' option, choose that). Repeat. Repeat. Repeat . . .

It's sometime taken me around a dozen head cleaning runs to sort out blocked jets, which appears to be the cause of your problem.

[sunny-dave]

Run the head cleaner a couple of times and then ... leave it well alone for a good few hours (say overnight)

Something has dried out - give it all a chance for some fresh ink to seep through.

[1ozzy]

Toss it out the window and jump on it, post a video for us to watch.

Then buy a laser printer. After years of wasting ink cleaning nozzles and getting poor print quality that's what I did. Never regretted it!!

Works first time every time.

[anaxcrosswords]

Thanks friends.
Although it absolutely killed ink levels, multiple head cleans did the trick and I was able to print off what needed to be printed.