I'm late to this thread because of the holiday weekend in the US. On the lower cost Epson printers it seems more prudent to just chunk the printer and buy a new one versus swapping out the head. That said, I just ordered a head and tech manual for a Stylus Photo 700. Mine is one of the converted models that prints directly on CDs sold by Affex. The Epson base is a very inexpensive printer, but replacing it with another Affex would be costly so I decided to try head replacement. I ordered the head and tech manual from a US online site for about $90 total. I'll post to the list if I encounter any special problems.

In the meantime I'll say that during the week that I've been waiting for the replacement head to arrive, I've just about managed to get the original head into good working order again through patience and MANY head cleaning/purging operations. It would print no magenta at all when I started the process (no light or dark magenta) and had occasional gaps in black and cyan. The cause of the problem on this printer was most likely lack of use for extended periods. When it started printing poor magenta, I just went to printing black only labels for a while which probably allowed the magenta clogged heads to dry and get even worse. Wanting color again (printing with Gimp-Print now and there is no black only option) I tried all of the various Windex (Windolene) tricks including filling a set of carts with the stuff and using it to purge the heads. Slowly (over a period of several days) I began to get some printing capability back in magenta. Each day I'd do several cleaning cycles and print a couple of purge prints. Each day the print quality improved. It's now consistently printing with only one gap in the dark magenta portion of the head test pattern. By the time the back-ordered replacement head gets here, I may not need it. The moral of this story is to keep those Epson printers in use. Even a very small amount of printing every few days should be enough to keep fresh ink in the heads and avoid drying/clogging problems.

Bob Smith


On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 04:03 AM, Jason Butcher wrote:

We changed our 5000 head (dark) twice now, with no special software and it's
fine. My experiences of equinox are that I wouldn't recommend them.
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