To give you an idea of how old the 880 is, a few months back the
"built
in obsolescence" warning came up saying it was time to have it
serviced
(in Epson-speak, "time for us to quote you such a high price that
you
will buy a new printer"). That is, the ink sponges inside were
saturated
and at the end of their life according to the count of sheets
printed.
(snip)
Sadly, when the Stylus 880 goes to that great inkjet factory in the
sky
(the local recycling depot!), I'll have to invest in both QPCprint
and a
new printer unless I strike lucky and get another of these on eBay
or
something like that.
.... well you could disassemble, empty the overflow reservoir and
clean
(or replace) the foam pad.
It is well worth delving into the innards. I did that with a Stylus
830P and there was a *vast* amount of ink washing around in the large
tray.
Tony
I was too afraid of trying that before the shop had a go at it. I
might have tried if they had failed.
Don't have enough confidence to go messing about inside the delicate
parts of printers! Plus, I had just bought a large number of
compatible cartridges worth more than the cost of buying a cheap
printer, so I figured if it could be persuaded to keep going until
those were used up, it would have fulfilled its purpose and could go
then.
As it happened, the shop told me that taking it apart to replace the
sponges etc wasn't worth while and risked ending its life in one go,
so I was afraid of trying that. Especially as they'd only charged me a
small nominal sum for resetting the print count (or whatever they do).
But, it works, hopefully long enough to use the half-drawer of TO19
and TO20 cartridges. I suspect that as you say there is some ink
sloshing around in there, because it does "highlight" the odd line of
text with narrow blue streaks every once in a while, but it works well
enough for now at least.
Dilwyn Jones
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