Epson 3000- clean one head, clean them all?

[Benny]

Don't get me wrong, I like my 3000, because it prints the A2 charts I need.
But Epson hasn't exactly kept up with XP- no specific drivers except the
generic one provided by XP, as far as I can see. The handbook on my recently
bought 3000 doesn't even mention XP, in fact.
Anyway, I needed to clean the heads. I ran Nozzle Check, and found that the
blue (cyan) nozzle needed cleaning- the 3000 has 4 nice big ink cartridges,
black, magenta, cyan and yellow. However the only option I was given was to
clean ALL the colour heads.
Is there really no more advanced controls for the 3000 in XP? I remember my
good old Epson 600, with Windows 95, gave me a little dialogue box that
showed how much ink was left, how many pages were left to print, and then at
the end of the day bought me a beer. Well, most of those, anyway.

Benny
*******

 

[Cerridwen]

Don't get me wrong, I like my 3000, because it prints the A2 charts I
need. But Epson hasn't exactly kept up with XP- no specific drivers
except the generic one provided by XP, as far as I can see. The
handbook on my recently bought 3000 doesn't even mention XP, in fact.
Anyway, I needed to clean the heads. I ran Nozzle Check, and found
that the blue (cyan) nozzle needed cleaning- the 3000 has 4 nice big
ink cartridges, black, magenta, cyan and yellow. However the only
option I was given was to clean ALL the colour heads.
Is there really no more advanced controls for the 3000 in XP?

No inkjet (that I'm aware of) gives you the option to 'clean' one nozzle at
a time. IIRC the 3000 still uses a black and a tri-colour cartridge, so
cleaning just the cyan might be a bit difficult. The drivers - and printer
utilities - have nothing whatsoever to do with the OS, they are dependent on
the manufacturer producing them. If you've never had one-nozzle cleaning
functionality under any other OS, you're not going to have it under XP.

The Status Monitor is only going to be available if Epson have decided to
update it so it runs under XP. If they, haven't there's nothing you can do
about it.

 

[Benny]

The stylus color 3000 has 4 completely separate cartridges, for the 3
colours plus black - each plugs into its own separate slot. I've given up
hoping for a status monitor, but I'm still puzzled as to why, if I can clean
the black head separately, I can't clean the identical magenta, cyan or
yellow cartridges. The computer gives me a separate warning light if the ink
runs out in any of the four carts. Oh well, one of life's little puzzles.

 

[Ototin]

The stylus color 3000 has 4 completely separate cartridges, for the 3
colours plus black - each plugs into its own separate slot. I've given up
hoping for a status monitor, but I'm still puzzled as to why, if I can clean
the black head separately, I can't clean the identical magenta, cyan or
yellow cartridges. The computer gives me a separate warning light if the ink
runs out in any of the four carts. Oh well, one of life's little puzzles.

It is not a puzzle at all. The Color 3000 has two separate print head
assemblies. One for the black nozzles and one for the cyan, magenta,
and yellow nozzles. A clean cycle on the colour print head assembly
will extract ink from the cyan, magenta and yellow ink cartridges.

 

[Benny]

So this means that although I have three separate colour cartridges, they
all work through the same print head? OK, now I understand. Thank you for
the info.