Digital BW, The Print

If you have suffered this condition on your 3000 you may be 
interested to know the reason. The Epson 3000 and all the other 
Epson injets I imagine, have a built in counter and after a given 
number of print cycles and CLEANING cycles it will LOCK with all the 
lights on. The printer is NOT broken, it needs something called 
a "Maintenance Reset" which should be carried out by a qualified 
engineer. The reset is very simple, just power on the printer whilst 
holding a couple of buttons down.
What is most important is that the condition is telling you that the 
waste ink pad is full! I was wondering where all that ink went when 
I did a clean cycle. Changing this pad is no easy task, the printer 
mechanism has to be dismantled.
However, if you are really interested in getting a pool of ink under 
your printer, please let me know and I will give details on how to 
do this reset.

The main point of this post is to warn against multiple clean cycles 
in a effort to clear the printhead of Banding, if you do you may end 
up needing to carry out the above maintenance.

The chief culprit of banding may well be the fact that when the 
print head is "parked" and the printer carries out a clean cycle 
there is a rubber seal around the small pad which contacts the print 
head. A pump them sucks to pull some ink through the head itself. 
Clearly if this seal is dirty, then this action of pulling ink 
through the printhead will not happen. I suspect that dirt, ink etc 
may buildup on this seal. A possible solution is to follow the 
recommendation of regually putting a SMALL amount of Windex on the 
pad on a daily basis.

I hope this helps one and all. I also hope that this is considered 
to be ON TOPIC and NOT Infringment of Copyrite. If you consider it 
to be either then do not read this post and delete it from you brain 
and "puter.

NODBO