Yesterday marked the third birthday of my 7900, and of this blog. Making prints has become completely routine. Most of the printer's mysteries have either been solved, or accepted as part of the game. There's rarely anything interesting to talk about. Most of the time the 7900 just works. When it doesn't, the problems have been the same, namely, ink delivery issues, aka "clogs", which almost certainly are sometimes clogged nozzles, but sometimes are other reasons for ink not reaching paper. When a nozzle check fails, it may require a single cleaning of a nozzle pair to clear. Or, it might require a "powerful" cleaning of a pair. Or, it might mean 45 minutes wasted trying to clear nozzles via various combinations of cleaning methods, and may also entail swapping low-ink cartridges for full ones, and then swapping back in the low-ink cartridges to continue with the print job. One never knows, making it impossible to budget time for any given print job. Some take minutes. Others take much longer before any printing can begin. That's life with a 7900.
Otherwise, my Epson has been pretty well behaved. It's made lovely prints. It's made money, too; if the machine failed catastrophically tomorrow I'd be disappointed, as would the client waiting for her order of 28 prints. But I'd have to admit the 7900 has paid for itself and its consumables many times.
A final tidbit for today: my machine still has the OEM "starter" cartridge for MK, obviously an ink I rarely use. That cartridge is down to a couple of percent, so I have a fresh replacement on-hand. Still, it could be some time before I need to install that.
As life with the 7900 has become more routine, postings to this blog have become fewer and fewer. There's simply been little to report other than to say it's still cranking out beautiful prints, which doesn't make for interesting reading. I hope it stays that way for years to come!
--Jay
