HP Original Cartridges

1500 Sheet Input Tray

Reliable Remanufactured Cartridges

One of the merits of the P4014 against a new printer is the low cost of good re-manufactured cartridges.

HP CB523A 1500 Sheet Feeder for HP P4014 Series Printers.

The CB523A part was the 1500-sheet High-Capacity Input Tray (HCI) for use with HP LaserJet P4014 and P4015 printer series. Manufacturing ended around 2011 when the CE398A was introduced - that has the same mechanical design and styling and is backward compatible so it replaces the CB523A.

Media sizes supported are: Letter, Legal and A4.   HP say: This high capacity paper tray enables increased productivity in the workplace and users are able to meet the demands of high volume printing requirements.

Basically the high capacity input has two uses:

• It supplies a bulk of white office paper where a stack of feeder-cassettes is in use, some with coloured paper for forms or copy documents.
• It can be used simply to keep the printer going if it does tasks like book production or billing. One of these printers can work through the content of a 500 sheet cassette in under 8 minutes; the HCI can keep the printer running for half an hour.

CB523A is very like its predecessor Q2444B used with the LaserJet 4200 and 4350 and successor CE398A used with the Enterprise 600 M601. These units go under the printer and are the base of the stack. (They don't have a feed through slot so unfortunately they aren't stackable).

The CB523A is little more than a big paper cabinet in use.

Internally it is quite an intriguing mechanism, paper is gradually lifted by a motor driving a lift plate to keep the top of stack producing the right pressure on the pickup roller and pointing at the nip between the feed an separation rollers.

Web research suggests the CB523A and its predecessors are not notorious for faults - they are robustly built. It isn't a fault, but the soft feed rollers will wear out. Soft rollers are used for cut-sheet pickup and feed and they inevitably will wear out. Interestingly HP have used the same RM1-0036 pickup with a pair of RM1-0037 feed and separation rollers - the same roller set used in the very differently designed 500 sheet feeder drawers. It just goes to show that designers could use standard rollers if they tried?

Most likely faults are probably items stuck in the paper feeder stack. Next most likely are feed problems cause by the rollers. If the problem isn't a roller then it could be torque limiter. Sensors can be tested in the printer's diagnostics menu.

As usual, if the printer or its accessory stack go wrong eliminate the roller problem first. Then because the torque-limiter is inexpensive and easily changed try that. The torque limiter given on P401 of the P4014 service manual is RC2-5262-000CN which is the same as that given for the cassettes (possibly swap them between cassettes if you don't have a new one)   (The torque limiter for the M601 has different part number RC2-5771-000CN).If you can't pin the fault on a specific accessory Then try removing all the accessories and testing the printer alone, replacing accessories one at a time until the fault recurs.

Persistent paper feed faults in HP printers often seem to be the feed release solenoid. The P4014 manual just show the paper pickup drive assembly RM1-5262-000CN.

HP Information

HP Partsurfer says about CB523A:

CB523A HP Laserjet HCI Tray

and to a query CB523:

CB523-67901 Optional 1,500-sheet feeder - Optional tray to increase paper capacity - Holds Letter, Legal, and A4 paper sizes
CB523A HP LaserJet HCI Tray
HWP-CB523A LaserJet HCI Tray

The query CB523-67901 gave:

1500 Sheet HCI Kit
Part CB523-67901 is no longer supplied. Please order the replacement, CE398-67901

Then in July 2015 it repeats that and adds a "used in" list as follows:

  … which does confirm that the newer HCI for the M601 series is intentionally backward compatible to the P4014.

Icecat says part CB523A has both a short public code CB523A and two GTINs (EAN/UPC) 8835852799442,088358527994. It shows 46140 product views on this item

Web Research

A Google Query on CB523A (in quotes") in August 2013 gave about 10,100 results (0.26 seconds) with the first in organic search being as follows:

hp.com product specs, amazon.co.uk £481.49, amazon.com $583.95, printware.co.uk £460.00, tonercare.co.uk £465.00, printerworks.com refurb $249.00, shopbot.com.au list (store.com.au) $689, ebay.com (greybeards_treasure)$79.99, theprinterdepo.com $357.99, adorama.com not available, officespecialties.com $542.74 call to order, bluedogink.com $498.99, atec.ro 2.739,75RON incl.TVA, colorhexa.com irrelevant page, ebay.co.uk (printermaintenanceltd) refurb £199.00 ended, renewcomputer.com refurb $400.00, 360tech.com refurb $595.00, centralpoint.nl 410.00, newegg.com out of stock, superwarehouse.com discontinued, pcworldbusiness.co.uk no price or basket, myshopping.com.au $701.00, computerspec.info no price or basket, getprice.com.au -lmc.com.au(Landmark Computers)$701.00, shopping.yahoo.com (Compubiz)$689.00, pricegrabber.com (Compubiz) $689.00, idealo.de € 518.00 +£12, colorcodehex.com irrelevant page

Prices noted are for a new item, one off, without tax. The list is as encountered. We haven't bothered with currency conversion - half of our readers are outside the UK and are more interested in dollar prices.

There are some pages with stock and pricing in this list- no helpful blogs on this part. There are a few irrelevant pages . All the rest in the list were merely vendors giving no more information than found in the HP brochure.

Supply Situation

In 2013 the CB523A part was listed under code CB523-67901 by one distributor who had some stock. In 2015 the part was listed by one vendor but with no stock. We think demand for the part will be very low.

Supply of the CB523A seems to have dried up in 2015, although one might appear on brokers lists.

Partsurfer says CE398A was listed by two distributors, neither of whom had stock at a sales price of about £450 for CE398A itself. However one distributor lists CE398-67901 (the engineering brown-box part) at a price around £300 In July 2015.

These are expensive items and use where bulk feed of paper is a priority. Price and availability shown in the side-bar reflects the situation on a daily basis and change with distribution lists. Stock numbers indicate there is not much call for the part.

Copyright G & J Huskinson & MindMachine Associates Ltd 2013, 2015. Some pictures derived from HP User and Service guides. These technical pages do not constitute an offer for sale; just our knowledge at the time of writing. See the catalogue. Sales pages on this Web site use cookies to store user information. We also use Google Analytics to track site usage patterns.