Printering

Once upon a time, in a job with Dell, far, far away.  I purchased an Epson Photo Stylus RX500 printer.  It was an excellent Photo printer with a device for scanning film negatives and slides.  This Christmas it stopped printing and threw up an obtuse error.  I did quite a bit of reading on various Epson forums and discovered that there was an ink-flow counter.  After it reaches a certain amount of prints the system requires maintenance.

This does not take into consideration that the printer had been cleaned out the year before.  Further, the forums suggested that you need to remove a component and use a specific device to re-set the counter.  This draconian methodology might be great for the bottom line, it is annoying to those of us who then decide that maybe Epson is not wanting my patronage...

In the back of my mind this seems entirely too improbable.  Consider, Epson sells thousands and thousands of printers.  Even so they are number 3 after HP and Canon (I would argue that Canon makes the best printers).  So some engineer decides that a counter would be needed to insure the working of the printer and there is some kind of kit that can be purchase to clean up the printer and replace the various wore down bits.  This would be targeted at those authorized Epson repair shops.  A search shows three on the West coast, my older printer is not even in the look up page.

Who would drive hours to a major city or ship a thirty pound package with pre-paid return postage when you can head to Costco and purchase a new printer for less?  Maybe that is the goal, to sell new printers.  I can see Epson not being a brand to return too...

Anyways, yesterday I found an obscure thread at www.fixyourownprinter.com that had some good information.

HOLD all following buttons: Power, Load/Eject, Stop, B&W, Color. RELEASE BUTTONS. After this printer turns on, you'll see "Init eeprom" on printer screen. Press Color button to clear protection counter. Hit the power button and restart it.

This did the trick and my printer is back in service.  Still the printer is plagued with some problems, like no drivers for windows Vista (which Tina has on her computer).