The solution: a bit of sponge (seriously).

The intake / feed-in rollers just slide around on top of the paper instead of gripping it and pulling it into the print mechanism.

The cause: a tiny spring, intended to load the paper intake rollers, is inadequately weak.

The symptom: the printer would be unable to take paper in, meaning it would sit and spin its internal rollers helplessly several times before complaining there was no paper loaded.

All components are nylon and plastic where possible, plastic is flimsy and important components like springs are small and presumably old stock - and this was ultimately the root cause of my problem. The Canon MG5750 (and printers of its ilk) are designed to a price, and that is cheap. The fix, as it turns out, is really simple! I put up with this for a while but an attempt to print some documents evening pushed me into investigating. Soon after buying mine, the paper feed (take-up of paper from the tray into the mechanism) started to behave irregularly soon after that I ended up having to nudge each sheet of paper in to the printer, it was unable to take in paper itself.

Resarch indicates it's sadly a common issue with this range of Canon printers. Unfortunately, one of the fundamental requirements of any printer - to be able to take in paper successfully - was a little lacking with this unit. Was handy at £45 (another set of genuine ink for it costs the same, go figure) but obviously I never expected it to be perfect.

I have a cheap Canon Pixma MG5750, a Currys PC World purchase when I needed a cheap multifunction printer fast.

Canon ip2700 printer wont work