Digital BW, The Print

Point taken... but I would guess the risk is relocking the carriage without
the head being properly home (as it sounds like you _may_ have experienced?)

Here is my take on the options (and risks):
1] If you take the approach of 'press the button to tell the printer you are
going to chage the cart' (whilst printer is on) alone then you risk the
printer trying to move the head back to the home position even though you
have a) not closed the lids and b) not finished what you are doing [this has
happened to me, but I don't recall if it was on a 1270 or 1160]. Now that
mnade a bad sound!

2] If you take the approach of push the button to tell the printer you are
going to change the carts... and then pull the power, then 'repowering up'
the printer by pushing the plug back in risks blowing the power supply. Not
a major risk for sure (and I have no firm data one this) - but many people
believe that power supplies on PC's and the like are most likely to fail at
power-on... like light-bulbs. Same with the printer, you just stress a
different component. And remember - PC's are designed to be turned on and
off. Epson printers are assumed to be on and powered up all the time, albeit
perhaps in a kind of sleep mode. I am not a power-supply-design tecchy, but
I imagine that there may be some feature of power supplies that could make
them safer or less safe for powering on. If making them safer involces extra
components, expect them not to be in desktop printers ;)

3] Any method like I suggest with switching the printer off at the front
panel, unlocking the head, moving it, doing your stuff, then returning and
relocking the head. The risk here is that you could in some way damage the
head 'horizontal positioning motor' - but I personally consider this to be
less of a risk than either of the above. As an aside, I have been having
some carriage errors on one of my 1160's - but interestingly not the one I
do this most on... it is however the one that I recently moved to a location
a bit too near a radiator. Whichever way, switching it off and on again
sorts it out.

In all the above, you will note that if you forget to return and lock the
carriage, on power-up, the printer moves the head to the left (as you look
at it) very slowly, then returns to the home / locked position. I don't know
what would happen if the printer head was LOCKED out of the home position
though.

So in summary, it seems to me that Epson have designed 'error correction'
into the printer... just like it does a longer cleaning cycle on power-on,
the longer the printer has been unused for (yes, it really does, based on
noises, etc).

Just my 2p

Nij


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steadman Uhlich [mailto:steadmanuhlich@...]
> Sent: 12 January 2002 14:21
> To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: how to move carriage manually?
>
>
> Nij,
>
> Again, I am not a techie....but I believe the tech did say that
> even with the power off it is risky to move the carriage by hand.
>  He suggested using ONLY the buttons on front to make the
> carriage move to the left.
>
> Steadman