XYMer's Home away from Home

So I go to print with my Epson 4000 and the only choice I have is the quadtone rip. I am glad that is still available but sometimes I need to print with the epson drivers and use the utilities. I tried to open the epson utilities via an Alias but it couldn't find the full epson software. The Epson stuff just disappeared with no reason. So of course I had to down load yet again the very out of date Epson drivers. This has happened before. Why ? I don't know I guess this is just more a rant than anything because I am sick of shitty Epson Mac support.

I've had good luck with Brother and Canon.

FWIW.

Under Windows, in the Advanced Properties section of the Print dialogue, I have "Use Black Ink Only" selected and saved as my default profile. I uncheck that to use color. Under OS X...no clue. Apple's print dialogues leave much to be desired in terms of features.

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a short encapsulated version of my Epson experience (Rant) and here is what I think of their printers:
my brother is the print master as he salvages honkers from the recycling and repairs them and uses them for another 5 or 10 years.
I have given up. I have a butthead HP (inkjet) all in one, (as in wash your butt, brush your teeth and take out the trash).
The only value is that it can make xerox copies. and it prints black and white but we are always scrounging for low priced ink cartridges. I rarely use the printer (under 20 documents per year), my wife uses it more than I do though I catch hell when it runs out of ink or paper.
some day some wizard will realize that there is a solid market for a durable inexpensive printer with inexpensive ink/tone cartridges. I passed up a low price low maintenance laser printer 3 years ago, because I need to make color prints from time to time.
with the HP there is a print utility that is supposed to allow for printing with the black cartridge only but you have to chose plain hagaki paper and no borderless printing or it will default to high quality which automatically deselects the black printer cartridge ONLY option

-v

I have an Epson 880 that I've had since, oh, sometime before dinosaurs evolved, and it works great. The thing I love about it is that I can get ripoff ink cartridges (non-Epson brand) for about $3/each. I gave another one to a friend so she doesn't have to worry about buying ink. We spend $40 and get, pretty much, a lifetime supply of vacuum packed cartridges.

It's not perfect. Since I only print about every other month, I usually have to run about five cleaning cycles before I get good quality out of it. The color output, even as just a four color inkjet, is very good on high quality paper.

I also have a LaserWriter 16/600 with more than 800000 copies on the print engine, which I've mentioned before -- it used to belong to my employer's accounting department, but they wanted something faster and gave it to me. I prefer it for black since it's networked and slightly more convenient to print to.

In the olden days I liked Epson because it didn't DRM its print cartridges; it was easy to get off-brand ink. I'm not sure if they DRM the cartridges these days or not, but if they do "chip" their cartridges I wouldn't want to buy one. Epson back in the olden days, Epson printers produced much higher quality output than competing Canon and HP printers, with Brother and Lexmark being complete jokes.

Epson printers have had variable in terms of reliability. Clearly, I have been pleased with the Epson 880, but the earliest Epson six-color printers were horrible that way. Between 1996-ish and 2004 they were quite prone to needing extended cleaning cycles before print quality was acceptable, and this wasted ink.

As for drivers, HP has had the worst drivers, hands down, since the late 1990s. In part I blame myself for this, since I interviewed for an intern position running an HP software driver assurance testing lab in 1997, back when HP was reintroducing Mac support for its printers. I was their second choice. If only I had got that position, maybe HP printer drivers wouldn't completely suck.

- Anonymous

I had an Epson stylus color something or other and after several years they put the chips on the cartridges but by that time I was back using the dot matrix due to the cleaning cycle problem (as you mention above).
The 1270 just quit printing with black, and I was doing Super A3 size prints that were very good quality - nice images and nice prints.
The HP was there because it was cheap and initially the 3rd party cartridges worked fine. After the HP software update which was monstrously large for a printer (900MB) the printer would not work as a network printer any more and those piss ant messages (this cartridge is not a genuine HP cartridge and therefore we will not talk to it so you go fuck yourself if you want to know how much ink is left) show up every time you check on "printer supplies" plus that dumshit Hagaki plain paper choice is the only way to get "black printer cartridge only" printing. stoopid.
those honkers my brother gets a hold of sound like that 16/600
-v