Printers suck. Why is it that whenever you're in crunch time needing to get 20 shirts sublimated, your printer decides to run out of ink? Then when you refill the cartridges, your heads appear to be clogged, you waste 15 sheets full of full color printing trying to fix it only to give up and use your backup printer. Then that printers colors work fine but the black has banding. You clean the heads a couple of times and the colors nearly STOP working but the black is then perfect. ARRGH! What is a person to do?
Haha exactly. Eventually got my old printer to work. After wasting another 5 pages of full color printouts. All in all I probably spent $20 in ink today trying to get the dang thing to work. Ugh! Oh well, a guy bought like 20 sublimated shirts at $14 each
Printers suck. Why is it that whenever you're in crunch time needing to get 20 shirts sublimated, your printer decides to run out of ink? Then when you refill the cartridges, your heads appear to be clogged, you waste 15 sheets full of full color printing trying to fix it only to give up and use your backup printer. Then that printers colors work fine but the black has banding. You clean the heads a couple of times and the colors nearly STOP working but the black is then perfect. ARRGH! What is a person to do?
If I only had a $1.00 for every time I have read about these problems
Jae'
__________________ www.amerasource.com
"Sublimation Printing and Product Fulfillment Services"
I usually only run 2 head cleanings at the most, but if that doesn't work, it's not likely going to help doing any more. After that I let it sit for several hours (or overnight) and usually when I try it the next time it's printing great. It's like it needs to sit for a while before it will work.
I think we all have been there. I have 3 Epson printers, a 1520, 1280, and 2200 and all of them have had banding and clogging issues at one time or another. I have tried all of the standard fixes with both good and bad results. I have tried printing every day, it helps but not all the time. I bought some print head cleaning fluid on Ebay about a year and a half ago and learned to live with the problem.
Here is a link to one of the sites that sells the fluid, it also has some good tips and other information that is very helpful:
Some people use Windex window cleaner (the one without ammonia) to do the same thing. I belong to an Epson printer group on Yahoo, they are mainly professional photographers dealing with printing their images on various types of paper media. They seem to have as many problems as we do.
Bill M
Last edited by snarley; June 1st, 2007 at 07:29 AM.
rdhracing, I'm not sure it's a problem that every printer doesn't have. Except a laser of course, which is why I like laser printers. They don't have sublimation ink for laser printers do they ?!
Glad to hear that I'm not the only one with these problems at least! Also I will try your cleaning fluid idea.
Cool, I love laser printing. I used to be a realtor and learned quickly ink jet printers don't work for a lot of things. Their prints run when they get wet which happens frequently in those flyer boxes in front of houses, so I switched to laser. I have a nice Minolta 2300DL color laser printer than cost like $800.
A better question would be how do you use the Simple Green to clean the heads? I mean where do you spray it??
Cool, I love laser printing. I used to be a realtor and learned quickly ink jet printers don't work for a lot of things. Their prints run when they get wet which happens frequently in those flyer boxes in front of houses, so I switched to laser. I have a nice Minolta 2300DL color laser printer than cost like $800.
A better question would be how do you use the Simple Green to clean the heads? I mean where do you spray it??
Chase
Chase, I am not too familiar with small format printers but I think almost all Epson printers have a capping station. If you have clogged nozzles, you would slide the printhead off the capping station and pool simple green on the capping station pad. You will then park the head on the capping station and let it sit for at least 30 minutes. After the appropriate time, you would perform a head clean and hope for the best. If a nozzle check shows improvement, repeat until you receive a perfect nozzle check.
Large format has some unique processes for head cleaning put I think this is the process used for small format.
Jae'
__________________ www.amerasource.com
"Sublimation Printing and Product Fulfillment Services"
Cool, I love laser printing. I used to be a realtor and learned quickly ink jet printers don't work for a lot of things. Their prints run when they get wet which happens frequently in those flyer boxes in front of houses, so I switched to laser. I have a nice Minolta 2300DL color laser printer than cost like $800.
A better question would be how do you use the Simple Green to clean the heads? I mean where do you spray it??
Chase
I used to use the 2300DL they have transfer paper made specificaly for the high heat no fuser oil printers like yours. I haven't read any of your other posts.. but if you have a heat press your good to go!
Rant and rave about printers. 
