Time to be done with Epson

[jnug]

Well at first I thought there was a chance I was overreacting. My Artisan 837 started blotching light magenta and then would not recognize the OEM light magenta cartridge. Did a head cleaning which cleared up the blotching but figured this was the beginning of the end.

Quickly bought a Canon MG8220 as this 837 has been babied and there was really no good reason that it should have gone into fatality mode so quickly.

I decided I would print a nozzle check every day that I was not using the 837 just to run some ink through the nozzles and make sure there was no clogging creating problems. Tonight after the successful nozzle check again the error message that the printer can't recognize the OEM light magenta cart. This is ridiculous. The machine is now running through light magenta carts like mad as the only cure appears to be to change the cart.

Going to unplug it tomorrow and install the Canon. Enough with Epson. A nice idea for a printer. Good photo performance, decent document performance and an ADF. But combined with the cost of ink, this durability issue is a killer. Amazon is full of reports of blotching color followed by inability to recognize the OE carts. Enough...done... by by.....same category I had to put HP in a year ago.

 

[turbguy]

I would recommend that you get an older unchipped printer, and be done with ECMs...

 

[jnug]

Since the performance of these printers one generation to the next invariably goes down, not up, that is not a bad idea. I probably stuck with HP too long. They were lousy printers 5-10 years ago and they are lousy printers now. Probably should have gotten off HP onto something else back then. But for now, the Canon 8220 will have to do. It is of course a discontinued printer. But Canon is at least 3 years, maybe longer behind Epson with regard to this chip and planned obsolescence nonsense. You can buy remanufactured refillable carts for one thing which makes the Canon printers a little more refiller friendly than the Epson printers on that score alone. Even going to a vendor site you can tell the poor vendor has to go through more hoops to try to support Epson than Canon. "This is compatible with this but not with that", "this is OE but not that". Sorta' feel sorry for the guys that try to develop products to help us to counter the efforts of the printer manufactures to limit by design the number of prints we can get out of a printer. They are so poorly made now that even the little devices the after market accessory makers try to sell aren't in many cases worth buying. You just can't keep the stupid machine alive long enough to even make those accessory products as viable as they could be.

All because Epson is:
a) adamant that you will only get so many prints out of their printers even if it means the built in clock strikes midnight and the thing turns into a pumpkin. They have been adamant about it longer than anybody else
b) adamant that you will use their OE inks

But they are all junk in reality. I expect I will have to find something older than 5 years old from Epson or Canon as a supplement to the 8220. They keep getting cheaper and cheaper in the price but the MTBF is just laughable. Granted there is the whole issue of computer technology advances and software/hardware compatibility which is the built in excuse for all peripheral manufactures to make junk. But this is ridiculous. If you get 500 documents out of one of these contemporary printers, photo-centric or not, you are doing good. It makes more sense these days to simply add the cost of whatever your current printer is to the cost of ongoing printing operation as opposed to separating the printer from the ink and the paper. Heck the printer is not likely to outlast a 500 sheet pack of paper!

I do like the Epson papers by the way. They have a wide range and they are really good papers for inkjets. Mostly great paper at a reasonable price. Not sure why Epson has not stumbled onto the fact that they are something of a bargain or at least a value in that regard and found a way to fritter that away from the consumer as well.

 

[jnug]

More for the people here that really want to know everything about these printers, I decided to keep the 837 plugged in a little while longer to see what would happen. I should have mentioned this earlier but it had actually started banding blue/green before it began blotching light magenta. The banding started a couple weeks ago followed by the blotching light magenta followed by the machine not recognizing the OE light magenta cart.

Today printing some stuff for a day trip, it was banding blue/green again and it also blotched light magenta again. It has not kicked this particular light magenta cart out the door yet but I suspect that is right around the corner. It stopped both the banding and the blotching before I completed my print tasks. So I don't know if I should do a head cleaning or leave it be. I suspect I should as there must be some chance that the blotching light magenta is not all coming out on the paper and it might clog the print head. I guess I will nozzle check first and see if that tells me anything. As soon as the printer boosts this light magenta cart, that will be it. I will disconnect it at that point and plug in the Canon.

But I will keep at it until then if only to provide you folks more data points on these things. By the way, should I try anything else? Does anybody want me to try anything else just for the experience and the data point?

Well if anybody is interested, I did the nozzle check. No blotching there but immediately after, the printer shuddered again, not as violently as the first time but it did and now does not recognize the OE light magenta cart again. So I guess this is it unless anybody has any suggestions. Clearly it is the machine. Happy to try something if folks want me to.

 

[Lucas28]

I too switched to Canon. But after a while, I bought an Epson again, I missed the pure quality.

The better pigment ink handling, the possibility of using gloss pigment ink, the ever lasting print head.

As you stated, the Epson technology is some years ahead of Canon.

In the past I too had problems with (another) Epson printer which didn't recognize the OEM carts. But with this printer I use refillable carts equipped with ARC chips. Haven't had problems with it.

The printer is used with OCP pigment ink, which I consider the best ink there is.

You might think I have an Epson logo on my cap, but that is not so.
I sure would like a cap with the OCP logo!

 

[jnug]

To be honest I will probably forever be kicking myself for not having turned to Epson at a point in time when I could have gotten an 800 instead of the 837. None of us seem to be able to escape the tendency for peripheral manufactures to take a good series of products and drive the goodness out of it while they are driving the cost out of it. The 837 falls short of the 800 for quality of output and a little research suggests that an 800 will way outlive the 837 for service life.

I am disappointed that my 837 as charmed a life as it has led just crumbled before my eyes over a very short period of time. From the point the banding started (first sign of a problem) to the point where it is now, eating OE light magenta carts, is only about 50 prints total including nozzle checks. Most of those were just plain old docs.

I have a refurb 837 that is still in its box. Forgot I had it. But not really sure what I am going to do with it. I firmly believe from what I have read about the 800 that the Artisan series peaked with that printer and that in the 837, Epson in its stedfast perspective creating complexities on top of complexities in an effort to keep us buying OE ink, buying them in large quantities and then ultimately obsoleting machines that might be working just fine by virtue of a built in clock working off the head cleanings, has overcomplicated the device while driving out cost and quality to the point where it is vulnerable to these sorts of maladies.

As I said earlier I love their papers and think much of what is accomplished is via their paper which can be used with printers from other vendors.

 

[jnug]

So, to your point Lucas, while these two printers do things very very differently I decided that at the first order I would take a few of the nozzle checks I had done with the Epson and compared it to the first nozzle check with the Canon. Again these two companies do nozzle checks in a completely different way....but I think I can see without much difficulty that the Epson produces more vibrant colors. Maybe it would be hard for it not to especially on a nozzle check since the Epson is simply producing a sample from each of the color carts and the Canon is mixing grey grey into each color to produce a tone.

The more I print with the Canon the more I will find out.

 

[turbguy]

There should be an indistinguish difference between the output of a 6 color Eppson using dye, and a Canon 6 color Canon using dye...similar to comparing Canon to Nikon.

 

[stratman]

... similar to comparing Canon to Nikon.

I may regret this, but, what do you mean?

 

[jnug]

There should be an indistinguish difference between the output of a 6 color Eppson using dye, and a Canon 6 color Canon using dye...similar to comparing Canon to Nikon.

I could see where the photo or color document output might be hard to distinguish especially for somebody like me. As for the nozzle checks, the two companies do things so differently. Yes they are both 6 tank machines. But the Espson is nozzle checking five separate colors with nothing mixed. So it gives you a pattern for each tank separately. The Canon must be mixing to get all the colors of its nozzle check as there are only three color tanks in the six tank system, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. The Canon nozzle check is three tones for each color. So the Canon has to be mixing in its nozzle check pattern or else how else could it create those three different tones.

So my point earlier was that while the nozzle check was all I had, I did not think it could really tell me very much.

The very last things the 837 printed were from Google maps. I am going to print out from Google maps on the Canon and see what I can see.