Epson Inkjet Preventative Maintenance

The following is everything I currently know about Epson inkjet preventative maintenance - specifically, models 1270, 1280, 1290, 2000, 2100, and 2200 which have micro-chipped ink cartridges. I have no idea how much of this information is also valid for other brands of printer or other Epson models.

If anyone has further knowledge, please share.

Preventing Head Clogs

Printers are highly mechanical, moving-part gadgets, it's pretty much a crap shoot how long a given unit will last, but you can hope for at least two years of moderate to somewhat heavy use. One thing that can ruin your day - and/or your printer - is the infamous head clog. Preventing head clogging is mainly about keeping the nozzles from drying out. Here are a few tips I've garnered:

Never remove a cartridge from the printer without putting another one in it's place. Exposing the nozzle to air for more than a few minutes is a great way not only to cause a clog but to totally trash your print head. A so-called empty (chipped) cartridge still has a few ml of ink in it, so leave an empty cartridge in place until you can replace it.
Keep the ambient humidity from going below 20% (or above 80%). That's the figure the manual gives, but I'd be nervous going that low, myself. Shoot for 40% to 60% if at all possible.
Keep partially-used cartridges in plastic bags so no grit gets on the ink outlet and from there into the nozzle.
It used to be recommended to power the printer off (using it's on/off switch!) when not actually in use, but that advice now appears to be obsolete. The principle involved here is to return the print head to its capping station, which seals the nozzles so the ink in them doesn't evaporate, causing clogs. However, recent models now automatically return the print head to the capping station whenever it is not actually printing, so the printer can be left on for up to a few days (see here.)
So far as I know, the head cleaning cycle is for clearing clogs and does not have any preventative value.
Remember to shake a new cartridge of pigment inks before use.

Low Ink Warning vs. Cartridge Empty Warning

Can I wait until a cartridge is reported to be completely empty to change it, or do I have to change it when I get the flashing Low Ink warning?

Again, the danger is in letting the ink nozzles dry out. This can happen even with a full cartridge in place by not returning the print head to the capping station; or it can happen if you remove one ink cartridge but fail to replace it with another fairly promptly.

As mentioned, there is still ink left in a chipped cartridge when the print driver says it's empty and refuses to print. So leaving an "empty" cartridge in place is no danger to your print heads.

Because of the high cost of Epson cartridges, most people run each cartridge down until the driver says it's empty and refuses to continue printing. But they have a replacement to hand. You can replace one cartridge with another one in the middle of a print job and not see the slightest indication of where the job was interrupted. In fact, on my 2200 the low ink warning says: "You may continue printing until the ink runs out, or click the How To button to change the ink cartridge now."

Idleness and the Devil

There is a persistent theory on the web that leaving a printer idle for X number of weeks or months can result in head clogging. I used to accept this on faith, until my son fired up the Epson 740 that had been on a shelf for two years and got perfect prints right off the bat. My new hypothesis is that the combination of low humidity and/or heat plus lack of use is the actual culprit, at least for dye ink printers.

Epson recommends using UltraChrome cartridges within six months or purchase or one year from date of manufacture, according to the packaging. Beyond that the ink colours may shift. In practice many people report no such shift. ---

Printing Close to the Edge

2200 especially. The Epson printer driver's Paper tab has a group of options under Printable area. One first discovers these when trying to correct the problem of prints not being centered from left to right on the page. Choosing Maximum solves this problem but can lead to another if you try for a right margin smaller than about 1/2 inch or 1 cm.

The problem is that you can't print that close to the trailing edge of the paper. This is for two reasons. One is that the rollers can't always get enough grip on the last 1/2" to keep the paper straight. The other is that the rollers can't keep the corner down, so if the corner has even the slightest bit of upward curl the print head will catch on it as it returns, which further raises the corner, which causes the print head to hit it even harder the next pass, etc.

It took me a while to figure this out. When I got my 2200 I automatically enabled the Maximum setting under Paper in the driver, which had never caused a problem with my previous 1270. I probably got a black corner on at least five 2200 prints before I clued in. That was over a year ago and my 2200 is still working perfectly, so apparently no permanent damage was done ... but then again I may have just been very lucky.

For certain forms of commercial work getting as close as possible to full bleed may be critical, but for personal and art use, a wide margin may actually be an advantage. The main reason for buying an UltraChrome printer is longevity. I don't know if the following is still true, but it seems reasonable:

My friend Andy, who has been in the darkroom since the '60s, tells me that he was taught to leave a wide margin because paper yellowing starts from the edges and slowly creeps inward. So the wider the margin, the longer it will be before the image area is affected.

Power conditioning

The reason I now own a 2200 is because my previous 1270 started giving me no end of grief with erratic colour shifts. One theory that the on-line community raised was that I needed a voltage regulator. Unfortunately, I got my voltage regulator and my new printer at the same time, so I can't report whether conditioning would have helped with the 1270 or not. Most battery back-ups have line conditioning built in, which makes buying and using one doubly important.

Whether or not power fluctuations can affect the colour of your prints from job to job, power spikes certainly pose a danger to the electronics of your printer and the rest of your computer system.

Consistency checking

A vehicle owner quickly becomes sensitive to the slightest change in the sounds his or her vehicle makes. A new rattle or squeak is grounds for alarm. The parallel in printing would be to see a fault such as banding or colour shift appearing in a print. Two problems: Depending on the size of the print, re-printing could be expensive. Also, in the case of a colour or darkness shift, tracking down the cause can be difficult. So here's another tip.

Fig 1

Fig 1. Printer Test image

The above image prints at less than 2" sq. uses very little ink, feel free to download it and use it yourself. 25 repeats of it will fit on a sheet of letter-size paper. About once a week I re-print this image using the same paper stock and using exactly the same print settings each time. I scrawl the date next to each re-print. I then look closely at the latest print to make sure it looks exactly like its predecessors. I'm checking that all colours are identical, the same degree of shadow detail is there, and that there is no banding. Remember, if using dye inks, to allow sufficient time for drying before making a final judgement.

The landscape contents of this test image makes sense for the kind of printing I do - if it doesn't work for you, by all means create your own test image. You may want to reuse the solid colour areas, however, since they're there to check for banding. I also suggest you do keep a separate test series for each paper and profile combination you regularly use.

As a more formal check on banding, I run the nozzle check pattern maybe once every month. At the same time I also run the first page of the print head alignment diagnostic. Again I date these and set them aside.

If your subsequent print job comes out not looking as you expect but the 2" test print was good, then you know the problem is in your Photoshop settings (or whatever software you use), not the printer. If the test print shows banding, then of course you would run a nozzle check and/or alignment check. If the test print shows colour shift (and you're sure you've used the same profile), then either you've changed a software setting, or you've got software corruption, or you've got a physical problem with the printer and/or the inks.

Also note that this test is completely independent of your monitor calibration and profiling. Reprofiling your monitor may cause you to adjust the colours in your images differently, which could become a source of puzzlement if your printer output changes, but with this test you are comparing print to print, not print to screen.

Because there are so many settings between Photoshop and the Epson driver that can affect print appearance, I urge you to record the ones you use, either by printing out screen shots or by manually making notes.