Epson Printers ...

Amen!!! I've given up on inkjets. The little HP Laserjet 1020 I just bought is perfect for the small amount of B/W printing I do.

Bob

I had an original epson stylus color, with the front loading paper tray, one of the best printers I ever had lasted about 6 years, never clogged, never jammed, ink lasted fairly long time. I saw friends with color II's garbage, and the rest of the range since then I consider garbage. One thing about inkjet printers is you really should print something with back and color about once a week, even if its just a test picture or some black and color squares in paint. I curently own a HP 960 runs ok was fairly cheap even if the ink costs a lot. But I dont use it that much, I have a brother HL 1650 laser printer for the bulk of my printing.

color laser printers are not as expensive as they used to be, and in the US, it seems neither is gas heat.

roll with the times I guess

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005 08:12:19 GMT, "Peter" wrote:

news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

YEAH, Lexmark. WE have several in use in the front offices as well and have had NO problems with them what-so-ever. The brand of ink has little to do with how reliably a printer performs. If the basic design is flawed it'll clog with whatever ink you use. To answer your question though we had just as many clogs and seal loss problems with Epson's cartridges as with the better pro inks and tanks we used. (German made tanks and pantone inks.) Problem is Epson printers use pizeo prints heads and the whole concept sucks, it just isn't as reliable as the other designs available. Besides if you subscribe to the notion that it's ok to buy a printer that MUST only have the oem's ink cartridges you certainly can't be in this as a professional, or maybe you work for Epson?(Epson is basically a company of liars, what with their telling all their customers that the use of other brands of ink cartridges voids any and all warranties when as a fact of law it's just no so.) On the 800's we had we experienced constant clogs plus the software drivers were pretty lame as well.(The start up and logic functions on these models were tedious and slow. enough to drive even the most patient to fits, especially when after finally getting them in a green lite mode all you'd get is banding or total clogs on one color or the other.) Don't worry if you're any indication of the Intelligence Quotient of your customer we wouldn't want them walking in our shop in the first place.

Right! I spent hours of down time dismantling our 1500 and 3000 and cleaning the heads using an ultrasonic cleaner, only to have them clog up again after just a few hours. A total waste of time, especially if you're the basic consumer who just wants a printer that'll work when you hit the print key.( To some extent it's justifiable to do PIA maintenence if the printer in question gives better results when working properly and decent runs can be had between down cycles.)

You were lucky with that IIs. In the early production models of that printer they were reported to have very stringent QA on the line and put in better built print heads to start with. Not so on the later models, they'd gotten their rep established and were only interested in the bottom line after that. In the mid 90's and a bit later for overall image quality inkjet was the only thing cost effective for achieving tonal quality approaching four color offset for small runs and such though.(I leased a big Xerox four color laser setup back in 96 on their promises that it'd match

4-color in tonal gradation and overall gamut. Just more sales rep BS though. Far to contrasty and only poor gamuts to boot.) Happily today's laser printers are a far cry from then. I'd be using more myself if the cost per page would only get lower for color. I've been pretty happy with the results from the plotters we've been using, especially inregards to cost per page. I'm currently testing a six color thermal ink plotter one of my reps loaned me and am much impressed with it's output. Now if he's only telling me the truth about the low cost of the cartridges it might be worth the price tag.

The marketing strategy with most of the inkjets printer companies is aimed at making most of their profits from selling you the cartridges, hence the reason the printers are often so reasonably priced. Just a means of getting the buyer hooked on the never ending need to purchase yet another cartridge.(no better than the average street dealer in that repsect.) If they use a foam core it can actually promote clogging and air bubbles etc... Also lets them put less ink in the cartridge in the first place.( And NO, that old argument they put forth about the sponge regulating the flow of ink is just so much BS. Proper sized aperture ports would do the same thing while leaving MORE room in the tank for ink. That'd be too fair to the consumer though, not to mention cutting down on cartridge sales.) With all the inkjets we use in the shop and the front office I use aftermarket ink and tanks, it's the only way to see any profit out of any inkjet. If you want to try and keep your Epson going I can give you all sorts of inside info and tricks on how to get it to produce at least part of the time, just post your questions/problems.

I had slightly better results out of the blanks I got from Nujet and the seals I got from a German company, though in the end it amounted to just to much down time babying these crappy printers.(And the mods I had were supposed to be their best pro units.) Sadly true about the state of market for consumer units.

in.

salesman

slots

heads

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This

Say no more. You're an airhead.

No it's not, natural gas was about 30 cents a therm not too many years ago, it's been almost a dollar for several years now and is going up to around $1.20 next month here, makes me glad I put in a heat pump over the summer, cost to run it is about half what the gas furnace was. I still have the furnace as backup but hopefully won't have to run it much.

I dunno, I've dealt with one Lexmark printer that ran for years without any problems at all, I've dealt with a pile of others that were utter trash, it's entirely possible he just got lucky, he is afterall only speaking from personal experience.

No, and that is, or at least was, especially true of Epsons. The right ink is/was critical with them.

Tom

If the aftermarket ink is the same type of ink as the oem it will do the same job. Ink for the pizeo printhead printer IS a different type as that for all the other types of inkjet printers on the market but is easily duplicated. I used aftermarket ink refills from Nujet for some of my Epson's that actually flowed BETTER than the oem stuff and gave fewer clogs once you got the heads cleared and primed. Problem is Epson made their printers so shoddily that on most it was virtually impossible to get a tight uniform seal from ANY cartridge.(seal between the cartridge and the printhead assembly is achieved with a nitrile rubber o-ring in the cartridge ink port.) I service all the equipment in our print shop from the AB-Dick and Heidleburg offsets right down to the lowly inkjet machines and I stripped down a couple of those older Epson's years back to try and fix the problems. The printheads are built of some pretty cheap material and careful measuring with micrometers showed some pretty gross irregularities in the seal contact points.( likely piss poor injection molding during manufacturing.) On our 1500 it was nothing short of a miracle that we ever got it to work out of the box.( started clogging and losing seal after the first month.) I tried replacing all the nitrile o-rings in the ink cartridges with slightly fatter seals and it solved the seal loss problem to an extent but we still had problems with clogging,especially if the machine had sat for more than a week. Having to run dozens of cleanup sheets to get it to print one single proof is insane. Perhaps that's why the collection of Epson printers we have are collecting dust in a storage closet.

In the office we use the Z42's and they all work jusr fine. I did buy them as a batch and direct from Lexmark. I've also had much better success recharging the cartridges for these machines vs. some of the other makes out there.

I'll have to take your word for it, experience being a better teacher than training...I was told it was a cold versus hot ink thing...true?

Tom

The pizeo principle is a "cold ink" process.( Epson actually holds the copyrights/patents for the process) Other inkjet printers use heater coils to preheat the ink in the ink tanks. Pizeo once upon a time held the title for for the highest dpi attainable with inkjet printers, not so anymore. R&D on standard inkjets finally caught up with Epson around '99. The thermal printers use a dry ink on a ribbon and a hot pinhead assembly and in my opinion are the easiest and simplest low cost solution to achieve photo quality color images.( I've used some of the most expensive dyesub and laser units in the commercial market and a low cost 400dpi thermal ribbon printer gets really close for much less money.)

400dpi with dry ink has virtually no "spread" whilst those wet ink printers with dpi's in the 1,800's or higher suffer from marked ink spread/patterning.( unless you use a top grade photo paper, something not possible if you're trying to output publications etc...) AS a result that low dpi thermal ribbon printer produces a color print that has much greater apparent sharpness. That said great strides have been made in dithering algorithms in inkjet printers and if you use a good grade of paper decent results can be achieved with many of the inkjet printers on the market. It just tends to be more problematic balancing the grade of ink used and types of paper one has to use.( On alot of print jobs we do we're forced to use some pretty bad "rag stock" and using an inkjet to drop in color images here and there can be really trying. We have to use third party software drivers that allow us to control the volume of ink flow when printing on paper that's really open fibre.) On my Encad plotter we have potentiometers that allow us to adjust ink flow easily.

I used Canon inkjets for years, but in order to use pigmented fabric inks I had to get an Epson. Started by finding an old Epson 1520 in a thrift store, no cartridges, no idea how long it had sat unused. Took me a couple of weeks to get it printing 100%, but after that it was flawless. I get obsessed... so I started to pick up various Epson printers, so I could teach myself how to get them going.

Now I can get just about any Epson unplugged, of course as long as the heads are not burnt out. I don't disassemble them for this, unless there's been something like a big ink leak. Never used any ultrasonic cleaners. Syringes are bad news because it's way too easy to put upwards of 70psi with little pressure if using a small syringe.

I wrote up some of what I learned, for what it's worth.

Steve

-All- inkjet printers say not to turn off except by the printer's power switch. All of them.

Yes, the Standby Park position is the same as the Off Park position, however the printer does not instantly go into the Standby Park position and may move out of position for a short time for no apparent reason.

Careful about shaking cartridges. With older Epsons, they use a sponge foam filler and you can end up filling the foam with air. With newer non-sponge cartridges, you can end up with foamy ink and cause a bubble to get pulled into the head, mimicking a clog and requiring the waste of loads of ink in cleaning cycles.

I've read notes from people who say they've had Epson cartridges emptied by about 15 to 20 cleaning cycles.

Also, by the spike design of the print head/cartridge seal, it virtually guarantees an air bubble will get trapped. You can either waste ink on cleaning cycles to clear it, or let it sit a day for the bubble to rise out of the way. This is my experience.