Digital BW, The Print

OK, here we go. Many people are going to consider this as off topic,
but tough, deal with it.

#1 the 9000/9500 do not have carts in the chips. You can reset the
counters in the service menus, or by removing the empty carts. This
makes it nice for refillers.

#2 price... Kind of hard to decide as there are a lot of things that
could go wrong depending on how often this printer has been
maintained, and which accessories it has. Up to $1000 if it has few
prints on it. Maybe a little more if it has the motor powered take up
spool and new heads.

Things to look for:

If the heads have been used hard, and run dry, a nozzel check may be
fine. But when you get to printing the individual nozzel piezo can
heat and loose its function. So you really need to run a print to find
out if nozzels drop out in the print. This is more common when you
start running it with a RIP that can drive the heads at their real 100%.

Another thing that can cause the nozzels to drop out in the print is a
clogger damper or restricted ink tube. The plastic tubes get crushed
where they attach to the dampers, and over time the hole gets smaller
and smaller until you get flow problems.

Note also that the 9500 does not have a firewire card available, and
no USB connection. So you will need to deal with an old operating
system that has support for a parallel port (maybe win2000) or get a
USB-par adapter.

At this point in the life cycle of a 9000/9500 you should really just
go in with the thought that you will need to replace heads, dampers,
ink lines, capping station, wiper and ink waste pads. I haven't priced
these parts lately so I'm not sure of the price. Many of these parts
are used in Mutoh and Mimaki printers, so they should remain available
for a while. If you get lucky and all these parts last you a good long
time, then you got a bargin. Better to go in expecting the worst than
expecting the best and have to shell out a bunch more money to get it
working.

Also you really should build a separate computer to run this printer.
It is very slow in the modes that you will want to use (multipass,
highest resolution), so you don't want to tie up your main computer
while this thing spits out a big print.