Epson R2880 Appears Dead, Love/Hate, and some whining......

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Jan 1, 2013
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This'll be rather long, probably boring, but...

A few months ago, I set up my R2880 for a couple months of non-use. I pulled all the regular cartridges and put in the cleaning cars with the InkJetMall cleaning stuff in them... Printed, cleaned heads, printed, fiddled, and got everything making nice pink blotches and printing nice, clean pink lines on the nozzle check... Shut it down and powered it up every few weeks and ran a nozzle check just to be sure it was OK......

UNFORTUNATELY, yesterday when it came time to actually USE the printer, of course, not working correctly... Put in "genuine Epson cartridges", cleaned the heads, ran a nozzle check, and it printed... UNTIL I actually tried to print an image. No Yellow, No Magenta. Cleaned heads the standard 3 times. No Yellow, No Magenta. Pulled those to Epson cartridges and replaced them with carts using the Cone Color inks. Head clean, fiddle, nozzle check. Yellow worked. NO MAGENTA.

Took a piece of lint-free cloth and put it in the channel, soaked it with the InkJetMall Piezo cleaning stuff, and parked the head unit on it... Left it overnight.

This morning, nozzle check, 3 head cleanings, things look OK on the test blotch print. The nozzle check shows a few lines not printing in Magenta. Print an image. NO MAGENTA.

Pull all the cartridges and use a syringe to shoot cleaning solution down the magenta head. Did it the way the instructions say, which is the gently squirt in some stuff, let it sit, squirt in a couple more ml, let it sit, suck back into the syringe to pull out the smutch, then shoot some more in and let it sit...

Test, nozzle check, do head cleanings, NO MAGENTA...

On top of that, it started throwing an error that it couldn't read ANY of the cartridges, either "Genuine Epson" or refillables... And yes, the refillables have worked perfectly for the last 4 years... Fiddled, changed carts, cleaned everything (all the contracts), powered up and down, no change... I started getting an error message says something like (Remove media, clean any loose material from the printer path, and so on"... I can't give the exact wording 'cause I can't get the message back...

So, shut it off and left it for several hours.... NOW IT WON'T EVEN POWER UP......... No green light. No carriage movement, no nothing. And yes, it's plugged in, and yes the power is on, and yes it worked this morning.....

I've had the 2880 for about as long as they've been out, and it's ALWAYS been a love/hate relationship. When it WORKS, it prints well. BUT, this thing has ALWAYS CLOGGED. It'll clog in 3 days. I've used "Genuine Epson" cartridges and Magenta will clog in 3 days. I've used the Cone Color ink in refillables and it'll clog in THREE DAYS... I'm in Minnesota - it's HUMID in the summer so I'm having trouble believing it's too "dry". In the winter it's dry here, but this thing sits in a room with it's OWN humidifier. Between when I'm using this thing I've run nozzle check at LEAST weekly, leaving the printer off in between so it would run a "mini-head cleaning" when I powered it up. Even THEN, the thing would clog regularly.

I MUCH prefer to do my own printing 'cause it's so much easier to play with the prints. BUT, I'm TIRED OF THIS THING NOT WORKING... If I'm going to replace it, I want SOMETHING that's not going to clog constantly... Near as I can tell, that's NOT going to be something from Epson.

SO, I'm looking for a desktop unit that'll do at least 13x19, print as well as the 2880 or better, AND WON'T CLOG EVERY %^()@!#$% WEEK. And is "reasonably" priced, meaning it shouldn't cost more than the 2880 did... Be nice if it didn't cost a fortune for ink, either.

If anybody in here has any good ideas how to get this thing beaten into submission and working, great, let me know.

Alternatively, if you've got an alternative printer that fits my requirements, let me know that too...
 

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