A friend brought over a dead 4900, to see if we could revive it. After cleaning the capping station, head, etc per Dana’s video instructions, and a power clean, we tried printing a nozzle check. It’s remarkable in that it is ENTIRELY blocked on all channels. Not even a hint of any of them printing. I’d post a pic, but it’s easier to simply say take a blank piece of paper and that’s what it looks like!
My guess is that the lines are solidified, since this printer has been idle for two years, and not all of that time was in climate controlled space. Is there any remediating this?
For what its worth… I wouldn’t panic that you’re seeing a totally blank nozzle check pattern. I manage a college art lab where we have two 4900s among other things. One of the 4900s will go completely blank on nozzle checks on a regular basis. Usually a single normal clean brings everything back. Every now and then a second pairs cleaning is needed for one color that didn’t quite come all the way back. No this is not “normal” but the printer works fine otherwise… and its under Epson extended service plan for quite a while yet. If it dies totally we’ll call them. I’m not saying that yours should respond this way. I’m just posting to say “don’t think its DEAD” just because you see this.
I first saw this when a student was getting completely blank sheets of paper out of the printer repeatedly. Of course, I thought the student MUST be making some sort of obvious mistake in settings. I checked everything over and over… still blank paper. Ran a nozzle check. Blank. Did one normal cleaning. Everything back just perfectly. Its done this fairly regularly since if it sits for more than few days without printing.
I should add some background. This 4900 has been through at least five or six power cleans. By the end of the last one, the page wasn’t entirely blank: there were three or four 1/8" lines on the LK channel. (And nothing at all in any of the others.)
That sounds like our other 4900 right before the last call for warranty service. Usually with 4900s they just swap printers. They send a refurb and we send the dead one back in the same box. This time they actually sent someone from Epson (usually if they send anyone, its Decision One). He told me what he replaced but I don’t recall. I think it was primarily the capping station. He came with parts and didn’t work on it for more than a couple of hours. Has been working fine ever since.
Replace Dampers and Cleaning assembly. This might be able to fix it but in most regards I think that you should replace both the dampers and the cleaning assembly at once and make sure all carts are full before doing an initial fill to try and clear the blocks. If it’s a no go than you have problems in the head. It’s a crazy printer to determine if it’s worth it to fix or not. That is the situation.
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