HP 8500 won't give the option to perform a third level print head cleaning

Question

I'm not sure why I care since every time I clean the heads the printer is actually worse but the printer never gives me the option to go to level three cleaning.
The steps
* Go to clean print head option in the menu
* Printer goes through cleaning process possibly being momentarily interuppted by the check device process
* printer goes to aligning printer because no matter what is printed it always goes to aligning printer afterward 
* printer fails align and I hit ok
* printer allows the me to start the second level of cleaning and I start it
* repeat from 2nd step
I'm never given the option to go to the third level.
I have a nice 20 minute video of this. and that's only one cycle....
This happened before and after I updated to the latest firmware.
In regards to my first statement.  I started cleaning the print heads because the magenta stopped printing and after cleaning heads several times no colors or black print anymore.  I few days later somehow the printer started prininting again very poor quality and again no magenta so again cleaning the heads caused it to stop printing at all.

Answer 1

Hey @Taylor2813,
Welcome to the HP Support Forums!
I understand that you're experiencing print quality issues with your HP Officejet 8500 All-in-One. I would like to work with you today. I did want you to be aware that it is generally not a good idea to run many cleans on your product. Level 1 and Level 2 just run a similar cleaning process. If you want to run a third level cleaning you could manually go into the menu on the printer and simply run another clean. Because the cleaning process uses ink to flush the ink system on your product, should you need to run a third clean on the product be aware that it will be just using a lot of ink for the process. Generally the rule of thumb is: should the first clean and second clean not make a difference don't continue as it will just waste ink.
Because the cleans you have been running up to this point have made no difference and actually caused your issue to become worse, I do believe that your issue actually lies with your printheads. You have two printheads in your printer. One is the Black and Yellow and the other is the Cyan and Magenta. They control the ink going on your paper. If the Printheads are defective you will experience print quality issues. If the issue just affects Magenta than you may just have a defective Magenta printhead (should a new Magenta cartridge not resolve your issue). However, if the issue affects all colours and black than it would be a defect with both printheads.
For your reference I will include the Print Quality Troubleshooting document for both versions of the Officejet 8500 series:
HP Officejet Pro 8500A A910a: Fixing Print Quality Issues
HP Officejet Pro 8500 A909a: Fixing Print Quality Issues
In both of those documents you can see that should the cleaning not resolve the issue after 3 attempts than it is time to replace one or both printheads.
Should you want to look into ordering printheads I suggested calling our Technical Support.
HP Technical Support can be reached at : 1800-474-6836
If you live outside the US/Canada Region, please click the link below to get the support number for your region.
HP Worldwide Contact
Please let me know if this information is useful. I wish you luck with resolving this print quality issue!
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I work on behalf of HP
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