"JosephKK" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:39:46 +0100, "Arfa Daily"
wrote:


I think then, that you have been very very lucky. Perhaps the ones you
have
are so old that they come from a time when Epson could still build
printers
that were not worthless junk, designed to gobble as much ink as they
possibly can, from every cartridge fitted, when the jets on the end of
just
one of them, have clogged. In fact, I think you are the first person I
have
ever come across, who has not had a bad experience with one (cue hundreds
of
lurkers to now come out of the woodwork, protesting what marvellous
machines
they are ...)

Arfa


OK then. Count me as well, i have an old Epson color 860 that still
works fine and an Epson R200 as my main printer. Of course i only use
them a little bit. Replaced the inks many times due to finally
running out.

Here's a question. Is it because the Epsons that seem to prevail over long
periods, get only light use, as you say yours do, so only get turned on
when
needed ? I think that this has a lot to do with the clogging problems of
the
printers that Epson offer these days. I like to have my printer always on
and 'ready to roll'. I can't be doing with waiting 5 minutes while the
thing
coughs and wheezes its way to being ready. When I need to print something
out, I need to do it now. The HPs seem to have a proper 'sleep' mode where
the heads 'park' over the seal, as it goes to sleep. The Epsons appear to
just 'stop' with the heads where they were last left. They only seem to
park
if you do a full shutdown. IMHO, this is the reason that the heads clog.
Being left out in open space, the ink just dries in the nozzles. Once it
has
done, it can take several cleaning cycles to recover them. The fact that
colours cannot be cleaned individually, is a royal pain in the arse, and
leads to huge ink wastage.

OTOH, my current HP is now probably 3+ years old, and has never been turned
off apart from the occasional need to do a full reset, when for some reason
the network has lost it, and it needs to be forced to talk to the router to
get a new IP address allocated.

To be fair to the Epsons that I have owned, I have never had an issue with
their general performance, speed, or print quality. I just find this head
clogging thing, which is a well known problem, sooooo frustrating, to the
point where I just get mad with them, which ain't good for the old
hypertension ...

Arfa

Interesting. Both of mine are on continuously. And both park the
heads in sealed cups. Proper head parking is known to make a big
difference. Must be why printers that do not cap the heads combine
the print head into the ink cartridge.

So, how old are your Epsons ? None of the ones that I owned ever parked
properly. I wonder if they stopped doing it on later or cheaper models, for
some reason. OTOH, my HPs have all parked to a sealed area, yet some of them
have had the heads on the cartridge, and some haven't. The 5180 that I
currently use, has external heads, but they have never clogged as long as I
have owned it, so yes, correct parking is definitely significant in this.

Arfa