My aging 3800 clogs about once a year, and a simple cleaning (or rarely two) always fixes it completely.
Eric, it gets even better than that. I have a very close friend in Ottawa who "inherited" my 3800 shortly after I bought my 4900 about 3.5~4 years ago. He's keen but very busy and seldom used it. We visit them from time to time. The first year he had the printer he used it once or twice, but early on. We fired it up and it worked like a charm without so much as a head cleaning. The nozzle check pattern was complete. Fast forward
two years, we visit them again, and he tells me: Mark, haven't used the printer since the last time we tried this, so we really need to see if it still works. I wondered too. So we switched it on, and this time it did a head cleaning on its own. Then we did a nozzle check and there were some missing lines in every channel. So we ran a test print, then did a regular head cleaning, ran another nozzle check, found two channels still slightly blocked, ran another cleaning, did a check and the pattern was complete - perfect. So, this is almost three years of virtually no use and inks that were
at least two years beyond expiry. I think it needs to be re-profiled if he wants to continue using these heavily expired inks because we did have a few colour management issues, but if he replaces the inks he'll probably be fine with the existing profile. Compare this with my 4900 which is a superb printer given continuous baby-sitting and you get the idea. So yes, that model was/is stellar. And the fact that we got anything even close to tolerable output with such long-expired inks tells you something about the real-life elasticity of expiry dates. So the discussion we had is whether it's worthwhile spending 500 dollars on fresh inks for a nearly 9 year old printer, or donate it and buy the latest available with new inks and a warranty. Tough choice if you're not really printing :-), so maybe it will be the re-profiling option..............
Cheers.
