I’m chiming in here because I think I’m seeing a version of the same problem, at least as it was first described.
I have a 7880 that has been fully converted over to Cone Color inks that has been working great up until I tried to switch it over to Matte Black.
The switch didn’t go smoothly, there were what I think were several restarts and lock-ups with the charging cycle. It’s worth noting that I used the EPSON OEM changing carts as well as an OEM Matte Black. It did finally complete, but now won’t print with the same error message first reported in this thread, "The selected media type/print quality setting may not be compatible with the installed ink cartridge
Please check your new media type and print quality settings in the printer software." This is a window that pops up on the computer (Windows 7).
I think there’s a mis-match of what ink is actually installed (MK), what the printer thinks is in there and what (possibly) different aspects of the print driver thinks is in there.
Some notes:
Currently all cartridges in the printer are refillable Cone carts with the exception of MK which is an OEM cartridge. As is usual, the Cone carts don’t have a quantity indicator on the LCD but the OEM MK does and shows to be 50%
Unlike other EPSON printers I have, this one does not show the black ink currently in use on the LCD panel. I presume it should be there, but to be honest I can’t say for sure. I poked through the menu on the printer and couldn’t find anywhere that says which black is loaded.
Nozzel Test Print prints just fine from the printer.
The 7880 Printing Preferences window - Main Tab - Ink Levels graph shows “PK” below the black channel. I don’t know if this changes to “MK” when MK is installed.
From the Utility pane, when I click on “EPSON Status Monitor” it brings up a different ink level chart and this one reads “T6118” under the black channel. I believe this to be the appropriate designation for MK.
Printer and Option Information gives me two greyed out options for Photo and Matte. Photo is highlighted and it won’t let me change anything here.
I attempted the suggestion from before where I unplugged the printer’s power cable and USB cable, removed the carts, powered up, replaced carts - no change. I did not reboot the computer.
From the “Print Settings” option in the Photoshop print dialog it does give me access to all media types. It hasn’t greyed out the PK media options. I can’t recall if this is consistent with when it was set up for PK printing.
I have not yet tried filling and installing the Cone MK cart, but will be trying that shortly. My next step will be to connect the printer to my MacBook Pro and see if anything is different. I’ll update at that point and hope that maybe my notes here will help ID the prob.
There is deff. a mismatch in the driver. It shows as Matte in the main driver window but as PK in the Print Settings dialog. It seems that I can remover and reinstall the printer electing to use a new print driver instead of the existing one. This allows me to actually set the MK vs PK setting under “Printer and Option Information” but then it seems to lose the communication with the printer and won’t do anything at that point.
This is all still with the OEM MK cart. I’m now going to install the Cone MK cart and reset all the chips and see what I get.
Pandabob, you got the same bug! Maybe it’s Epson Ebola? Actually, I’m relieved that I’m not the only one. I’ve had to stay away from the printer for a while out of extreme frustration, and I had other work that didn’t require it. I’m going to try some other things, maybe today, but it’s good you seem to have identified the Windows driver as the issue. I’ll post more later if I come up with anything.
Update: In desperation I tried the method described in the Northlight website’s 4880 Black Ink Swap page (easily found on the web). This takes you into the printer menu to update the black ink parameters (and all the ink parameters). With the Epson matte black still in the printer I did the update and it seems to have worked. It shows MK in both the status monitor and page setup ink chart. And it prints in a normal way with ABW (haven’t tried more than that).
BUT, it was expensive. To do the update it had to do a full ink initialization and thereby flushed half my ink down the drain. I estimate I lost about 400 ml of (Epson) ink doing this. The one Cone cartridge I have, the LLK, dropped ink level by half an inch. So I took a big hit, financially. I tried everything to stop the initialization, including unplugging it during the process, but it would only complete it upon restarting. The thing that is still slightly weird, is that the PK/MK screen in the Printer Info tab in the utilities is still grayed out. But at least I seem to be back in business. I hope this is the end of this problem. I don’t think it’s the driver. In all, attempting this original ‘cost-saving’ switch to aftermarket MK has been a total disaster. I’ve lost a couple months printer access time and really extreme aggravation and probably between $300 and $500 in ink and paper as I’ve tried to fix this problem. As one might expect, I won’t let any non-Epson MK cartridge near this printer in the future. Other non-Epson (i.e. Cone) colors seem to be working okay for most people, and the LLK has been fine for me as well. I need to do additional testing to make sure all is back to normal, but I’m hoping it is.
Thanks for posting your attempts with the “ink change” method. I had that on my “try” list for today. My guess now, after reading your post, is that it’s a combination of mis-match in the printer along with intolerance in the Windows driver. The Mac driver seems to better handle the issue. What’s still strange is that my situation is such that I have all cone carts and an OEM MK cart. Today I’m going to put in a Cone MK cartridge to see if that resolves anything. I’m real glad to know ahead of time that going into service mode to do an ink change still purges a lot of ink.
For what it’s worth… I think this is an issue unique to the printers that you have to physically swap out the PK and MK carts. I have a 3880, 7900 and 9900 all with all or some Cone carts and there’s been zero probs swapping between PK and MK.
I attempted to use the method on Northlight to straighten out the situation. I was able to avoid an ink-waisting “charge” but it didn’t fix the situation. It’s worth mentioning that on the Northlight page for the 7880 it does have advice on how to avoid charging the ink line and that worked for me.
At that point I decided to convert back to PK and used the Northlight method for doing so. I was able to swap back to PK and avoid the charging step with their instructions. This did have a complication, though. At the end I ended up with an error message that read something to the effect of, “Ink Cartridge Error” but it didn’t say which one. At this point I was back to 100% Cone cartridges. To fix this I did two things and it worked.
reset all the chips
Unplugged the printer from the wall and while unplugged pressed the power button. You can see the printer try to come on as the last of the electricity is drained from whatever inside the printer. I don’t know for sure that this has any real effect… but it’s been suggested that this better clears the printer’s internal memory.
I plugged it back in and everything worked again - back in PK mode. I did have to run about 15 print jobs of sheets of plain letter paper with a giant black rectangle on it to purge the MK in the line and get it back to PK. I would print an occasional image (with significant black areas) on photo luster as was able to gauge my progress via gloss differential. This is consistent with what’s reported on the Northlight site.
In retrospect I wish I’d thought to do the “unplug from the wall and hit the power button” thing while I was trying to get MK to work. I also elected to not try loading a Cone cartridge with MK into the machine to see if that had an impact. I decided further experimentation wasn’t worth the waisted ink and my desire to print with MK on this printer wasn’t substantial enough to pursue the issue further.
I’m hoping that my attempts and notes here might help the next person that comes along.
It’s worth mentioning that this did seem to be a problem in the Windows driver. I was able to print with the MK ink in the printer just fine from my Macbook Pro. I did not try printing from a RIP on the Windows machine and I do wonder if that would have worked.
Glad to see that something worked. Or did it? You still don’t have MK working, as I understand it. I followed the Northlight sequence, and did refer to the 7880 version, but couldn’t stop the printer from initializing into a fill process either way. I did the unplug thing at various times, including leaving it unplugged for 10 days. That had no effect on my issue. I haven’t done a full session, in color and BW, to see if the 4880 is back in form, but I’ll do so soon. I’ve gotten afraid of the silly thing now, wondering what gremlins remain. It’s even had me re-thinking Epson as a printer brand in the future. The pro shooters I know have switched to Canon.
In our fine art print studio (ConeEditions Press), we have four 7880s and two 9880s using our refillable carts with ConeColor or Piezography inks. All printers are in PK mode, as they see the black carts as PK, but on our 9880 set up with ConeColor, we print with matte black ink and select matte media settings, and have had absolutely no problems/errors. Since the x880 refill cartridge chips are programmed with all color position information, the printer sees both black info and has to choose one, and maybe the PK code is somehow stronger, causing the printer to see the black carts as PK, but you should still be able to print, and the print driver should give you all media settings (both matte and gloss). The difference between our setups is we’re printing from Mac 10.4.11, and the driver differs from what you’re using on Windows 7 (so, if you get an error when selecting a matte media setting with our refill carts, then it’s likely the driver). If you have an empty Epson MK cart, you can attach an Epson MK chip to the MK refill cart, to make it read pure MK and avoid confusion of the printer reading both blacks. Please let me know before doing this if you’re interested, and I will give you instructions for attaching an Epson chip to the refill cart.
I’m sorry to hear of all the frustration you’ve experienced since installing our MK cart in your 4880. Although I don’t have that model printer here to check/test, it was introduced around the same time as the 7880/9880, and is similar in many ways, including the refill cart chips being programmed with all channel information. What Windows operating system version are you using? After re-reading your posts above, it looks like this is a driver issue (which started by your printer getting confused from seeing both black info), and you experienced several strange issues with conflicting black mode information in your print driver/status monitor.
I’m curious how you came up with the $300-500 figure that you estimate spending in ink and paper as you’ve tried to fix the conflicting black ink mode issue. Is this in addition to the MK cart and bottle of ink you purchased from us? An Epson 110ml cart costs $77, and a black ink change cycle uses about 10ml of ink in four channels.
Dana- The costs for this months-long problem are hard to quantity, but first I bought the Cone MK ($90 with shipping, rounded off), then had to buy an Epson 220ml ($90 ebay), then ran through a bunch of paper doing tests, alignments, etc, then the black ink swap try (which didn’t help), then the cost of re-initializing the printer (which I couldn’t stop - about 50ml per slot (400ml in all)… that’s my cost to date. I still now have to re-supply the printer with all the color and black inks it consumed. Does that come to $500? I don’t know. Maybe more. All I know is that it’s been an expensive proposition and has cost me a many frustrating hours trying to figure it out.
My OS is Windows 7 pro, on a pretty new computer, and I tried several Epson drivers, including some older ones, without any change (except the one that turned it into a 4800). Perhaps it is a driver issue, but the parameter update method seems to have (mostly) worked and that was after all the driver changes. I appreciate the attempts to help here on the Forum, but in fact it didn’t help me resolve this problem. The fact remains, the Cone cartridge bricked my printer. Blaming the Windows driver for not being good enough to use an after-market cartridge seems like a cop-out when it was the product that caused the problem. The moment I put the Cone MK cartridge in my printer it went haywire. Is that a good enough cause and effect? I’m not being accusatory, and I am glad you are providing a good service to many Epson owners, but if mine is any example, the Cone MK has a problem with 4880 printers.
I will do some testing with our x880 carts using Windows 7 to check if there’s a new compatibility issue I’m not aware of. I have tested with several Mac and other Windows systems over the years without any problems, but know drivers can differ depending on the platform and OS version, and both of you are having errors with our MK cart using Windows 7.
Once an initial fill cycle is started, it can not be stopped, but attempting to stop it by turning off the printer, etc… will just make it start again from the beginning, causing unnecessary ink waste. I don’t know exactly how much ink is used per channel in an initial fill cycle, and it obviously depends on the printer model, but when I know the 44" wide 9800/9880 printer models hold 10ml of ink in the line from the cartridge to the print head, so it would seem excessive that a 17" model would use 50ml per channel, unless the cycle was interrupted and started from the beginning a few times.
I will keep you posted with my findings after testing the Win7 drivers.
~Dana
Ah, you missed one crucial fact… The MK cart was OEM. Not a Cone refill cart. The printer normally has 100% Cone refill carts when in PK mode. But, I had an OEM MK cart and used it for converting over to. That’s what was really puzzling. The one cart that might seem to be a problem (MK) was OEM. This is def. a Windows problem… I hooked the printer up to my Macbook Pro and it worked as it should in MK mode. In the end I set it back to PK and there it shall stay. The need for MK was slight at best, so we opted to just keep it on PK.
Here’s something of an update on this issue for anyone that comes along looking for help.
I haven’t seen this with my own eyes exactly, but in talking with a friend over the phone that was having problems with his 7880 this is what he said was happening to him.
He’s a Mac user but was attempting to print to his 7880 from Windows via a virtual machine on his Mac and he ran into the MK/PK mismatch problem in the driver like I was seeing while trying to swap a different 7880 from PK to MK where the windows driver refused to recognize that MK was installed. This is while the Mac driver was perfectly happy. So, this sounds to be exactly like what I was seeing. The kicker? All OEM carts. No Cone carts or other 3rd party pieces involved.
I did see in a newer thread here regarding the 9880 that a possible solution is to just lie to the driver?
Hello, I am suffering from the same issues with my 9880. Please tell me that between all of you a solution has been discovered. I can’t count the numerous hours. I have spent trying to get my printer to print again. Somebody please help I am beyond desperate. Thank you in advance
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