Digital BW, The Print

First I want to thank all who have given advice to remedy this 
problem I am having.

I have installed OEM cartridges and run 10 purge cycles, with a 
couple of cleaning cycles mixed in there.  Still nothing at all.   I 
own a set of clening cartridges, and I am thinking of installing 
them, running a few cleaning cycles and purge prints and letting 
it sit overnight.   My assumption is that the solvent in the cleaning 
cartridges (Jet Jrano Flushing Fluid, which I bought from 
mediastreet.com), is going to work better than the Epson 
cartridges at disolving any clogged ink.  Any thoughts on this?

I am also going to put some Fantastik on the parking pad and let 
it sit overnight as well.

I mentioned that I re-cahrged the vacuum on the black cartridge, 
and somebody asked if I did this without replacing the cartridge. 
Yes, that is what I did.   I took the filter off the end on the syringe, 
took the cartridge out of the printer and installed a plug, and then 
went about priming the cartridge as if it were new.  You do end 
up pulling some ink out of the line and probably some ink out of 
the cartridge, but without the filter in place, the ink flows into the 
syringe chamber, and out the exhale valve back into the 4oz. 
bottle it originally came from.  The fact that it takes a couple of 
pumps before you can sense a vacuum, and the fact that you can 
see the ink rush throught the lines after you release the clamp 
suggests to me that this is working and possibly necessary to 
re-establish the flow of ink after taking the CIS cartridges in and 
out a couple of times.

The disturbing thing about the whole situation was that the day 
before I left on my trip, I was printing portfolio images, and it was 
working great.  If 10 days of inactivity can do this much damage, I 
might need to find another way of printing B&W.  Do black only 
prints out of the better Epson printers, the 5500, 7000, 9000 or 
10000 look any better then the black only prints out of the 1280?

Thanks again for any advice.
Justin Smith