Ink Out - Epson Stylus 640

[William R. Walsh]

Hello all...

I recently trashpicked an Epson Stylus Color 640. In what has to be a rare
event, the printer works great and happens to be perfect for the application
I had in mind. (This printer has a parallel port and I wanted a printer to
use with a PS/2 Model 85, which can only use a parallel port.)

It recently ran out of both color and black ink, but something curious
happened. The "ink out" light never came on, and the printer would not let
me change the cartridges. I finally had to "trick" it by pulling the power
cord while the carriage was out of the normal parked position. Then I was
able to change the cartridges without incident and the printer came right
back to working.

It looks like the cartridge has no way of "communicating" ink level
information to the printer.

Questions--does the printer just guess at how much ink is in the printer or
is there a more precise method of determination that I just didn't see when
inspecting the empty inks?

Is there a way to force the printer (short of pulling the power cord while
the cartridges are out and accessible) to let the cartridges out for
replacement purposes?

William

 

[Safetymom123]

If you download the manual for that printer you will see that there is a way
to get the carriage to move over for you to replace the cartridge.

That is the old style cartridge so when you take out the cartridge for
whatever reason it loses track of how much ink was in the cartridge.

Also make sure you have downloaded and installed the status monitor for that
printer. It will show you with every print job the amount of ink remaining
provided you don't take the cartridge out. If you do it will show full when
it isn't.

 

[Jan Alter]

If you download the manual for that printer you will see that there is a
way to get the carriage to move over for you to replace the cartridge.

That is the old style cartridge so when you take out the cartridge for
whatever reason it loses track of how much ink was in the cartridge.

Also make sure you have downloaded and installed the status monitor for
that printer. It will show you with every print job the amount of ink
remaining provided you don't take the cartridge out. If you do it will
show full when it isn't.

Holding the paper infeed button for about 3 seconds should let the head move
into cartridge change position.
The software simply guesses how much ink is left by the number of sheets
that are printed. There could be as much as 20% of the ink left in the
cartridge when the software says it's time to change. Alternatively I've
seen the ink run out many times on Epsons and the software said there was
plenty of ink left. Putting a new cartridge in the printer got things fine
again. Recently Epson made a settlement because of their ambiguous software.
I filled out forms for 80 printers at our school.and hopefully we'll see
something for that effort.