Epson SX420 Printer Problems

williacg

Hi All,

Can anyone offer any advice on some printing problems that I have been having recently?

I've had my printer for over a year now, and it has been working perfectly fine up until recently. When printing, the colours are quite dramatically faded, and the blue actually prints out as a very weak green, and even the black is very faded.

I firstly carried out the nozzle checks, as stated in the manual, and then cleaned the nozzles, on two separate occassions, but this made no difference, and so as a last resort, even though the cartridges were not quite empty, I replaced all of them yesterday, but this has not helped either.

Is there anything else I can do, or should I just accept that my printer has come to a natural death?

Thanks for any advice.

Williacg

interstellaflyer

Print heads clogged,unfortunately with those machines all you can really do yourself is keep running the head clean function until, hopefully they come right, how often do you use the machine? the most common reason, asides using very poor quality compatible cartridges is the machine being left switched off for weeks at a time. And before someone jumps down my throat regarding the mention of compatibles, a decent compatible will have ink that is formulated to get as close to the original as possible, the poor quality ones will just have a generic ink in them, ink formulations differ from manufacturer to manufacturer and sometimes between different series of cartridges from the same manufacturer. Back on topic, if you are using compatibles, sometimes banging in a set of originals can do the trick but there's no guarantee.

williacg

interstellaflyer wrote: »

Print heads clogged,unfortunately with those machines all you can really do yourself is keep running the head clean function until, hopefully they come right, how often do you use the machine? the most common reason, asides using very poor quality compatible cartridges is the machine being left switched off for weeks at a time. And before someone jumps down my throat regarding the mention of compatibles, a decent compatible will have ink that is formulated to get as close to the original as possible, the poor quality ones will just have a generic ink in them, ink formulations differ from manufacturer to manufacturer and sometimes between different series of cartridges from the same manufacturer. Back on topic, if you are using compatibles, sometimes banging in a set of originals can do the trick but there's no guarantee.

Hi Interstellaflyer,

Many thanks for taking the time to reply to my dilemma.

1. With regards to how often I use the printer - it can vary from not using it for maybe 2/3 weeks, to then using it for an hour or so, (once or twice a week), it's very hard to calculate, as it does vary on the content of what I am working on.

2. Ink Cartridges - I have been using compatible cartridges, but they are the same cartridges, from the same company that I have been using since I first bought the printer, after the original Epson cartridges were all used up.

I will go through the nozzle check-up process again, and see what happens (fingers crossed).

Thanks again.

Williacg