bloody printer

Do you use epson original inks?

 

No practical tips I'm afraid ... I had 3 Epson printers in a row, as the reviews were always saying they had the best print quality. But they always ended up being streaked or something. And on the last one I did always use 'official inks'. Seemed to make no difference. I suspect that you need to keep using the Epsons fairly frequently to stop the heads clogging. Mine used to only get used occasionaly.

So my long term tip is don't buy Epson (cue hundreds of happy and contented Epson owners to step forward.)

My last 2 printers have been HP, and they've been far better ... quieter and no streaking or other print artifacts, and seem much happier about the occasional use (so far!).

 

Epson are dreadful for this. I work in a local education authority and we had over 200 of them 3 years ago, after the break downs/ unable to get them repaired (who sells parts?) we've now moved to HP where not only can we get parts but for next to no cost we get 3 year warranties and next day replacement.

I ain't touching an Epson ever again

 

I used to rate their acculaser products, the C1000 particularly seemed like a nice piece of kit... until I worked in an office which had three used for proofing, at one point all three b0rked due to 'fuser head' failures, they basically overheated in an office which was below 15c when printing around 30 pages maximum per hour...

 

Any way to clean clogged heads? The Epson software cleaner don't work.

I saw a thing where you stick adhesive velcro to a piece of paper and print on it, but that was for HP printers. Maybe I could yank the printhead out and put IPA on it or something.

 

HP 4 teh w1n, I have to say. We have 3 of them at home (perhaps a little excessive, I know...) and have had no problems with any of them.

 

Do HP make any units with a compactflash socket for direct printing? It might be asking a bit much but I really like the idea of taking prints directly off my 300D once in a blue moon...

 

Like these?

 

My little HP Photosmart 130 has a 4-way media card reader - it's bigger, posher sister even has a little LCD screen and does a bit of cropping and simple colour/contrast/brightness adjustment I think.

Having a quick look at HP's site, looks like all the photosmart range have card readers built in, not just the little photo-sized printers like my 130.

On the 130 I noticed it's quite slow to transfer back to the PC from the compact flash slot, so I end up using another external reader that seems to be a lot quicker. Maybe the new range has USB2 and has sorted that out.

 

ick yeah. I had to chuck out a 460 the other day because it's print heads were clogged up for the nth time. I didn't fancy breaking out the meths and running it through for x amount of pages so I bought one of those fancy hp all in one doodads. All the epsons i've had have gotten wierd problems, except bizarrely the FX-80 dot matrix i have that dates back to about 82 ish. Which still works (noisily)

 

The only ptoblem with the HP direct printing things is the crap software they supply, contributed to my brother in law's PC suddenly stopping after about one hour of use, was a bugger to find that one.

Epson are good printers but they are one of the few obstinate manufacturer who are still running the inflated ink price scam. I switched to Canon because (a) their own brand is significantly cheaper, and (b) they don't worry about imitation brands which are even more cheaper.

 

To true, so I just junked it really, and use Explorer to access the flash card, and other software to print. Irfanview is free and seems to offer quite a lot of print control.

I don't know what it is with image software that comes with the device. It always seems completely useless. My Dad sends me Kodak photo CD's and again the software to view them is sheer see-through nylon pants. Much easier to just browse the CD and grab them direct. I guess they are trying to make things 'easy' for the untutored IT masses.

 

tbh, after seeing the amount of epsons we get faulty returns on at work, i wouldnt buy another one. All the HP ones that come back are usually user error . the 130 and the 245 are both fantastic little printers, great quality prints but the ink is a tad expensive. We use an HP PSC 950 in work, not sure if you can still buy them, but theyre great, all-in-one(with Fax), integrated card reader and a really funky OCR system for choosing prints from memory cards.