This printer is great, simple to use and it prints beautiful. It seems to have the same rich blacks as noted in the smaller P800 and I am only using my cheap paper, the Enhanced Matte on 100’ rolls, so I am expecting much better quality on the better papers. It is huge, a massive thing that seems almost over engineered but it seems that the P6000, P8000, P7000 and P9000 share the same box/ structure.
Couldn’t pass up the free shipping on the Epson P6000 24” printer from B&H. Was looking for a 24” printer to replace my Epson 7600 24” printer, which I had bought used on eBay. Knowing the problems with buying on eBay, I did check out the used prices and found them quite high, so for a little more money, I could buy a new state of the art printer.
Some things to know - the printer is listed at 222lbs. but with the shipping pallet and box, it is more in the 320 to 360lbs. range, It showed up fairly soon via FedEx freight but not in a big 24’ lift-gate delivery truck, it was in a large 18-wheeler truck with no lift-gate. So the driver and I slid it off the back of the truck and slowly lowered it to the ground and he wheeled it over to my parking space (it is listed as sidewalk delivery only and B&H does send extra emails to let you know).
The directions state that you should use four people to lift the printer. After getting it on the stand and placed in the room, I let it sit for a week as the directions let you know that the starter inkjet cartridges mostly filled up the ink lines and you would soon need new cartridges. When I started it up everything went smoothly and it was quick, after the bi and uni direction alignment, the cartridges showed about 35% remaining in all the cartridges except for the LK with was down to about 10% and the “ink low” warning was up.
Even though, I could get the printer to work the first few times, the “paper load” button didn’t seem to work without fiddling around with the “garbage can” button. Since I was coming from an older mechanical Epson 7600, I wanted to make sure I knew how to operate this printer correctly and was carefully following the directions. The display on the printer, after it went thru the start up, had a top choice of “Paper Loading Method” which led to a load paper choice when selected the next screen said press the paper loading button and NOTHING HAPPENED. The button didn’t work, didn’t light up and I could not load paper, everything was locked. Since it was friday evening, Epson tech support was a monday to friday operation, I called on monday afternoon around one o’clock. After 20 minutes on the phone with a tech, her solution was an Epson Tech support person was coming to me, tomorrow morning and parts were going to be overnighted for the morning. I put absolutely no pressure on Epson, even said there was no rush on my account. So around 11am the tech person showed up in my condo in southern Florida. He came in started up the printer and when it was up, he pressed the “paper load” button and it worked perfectly. I showed him the screen on the printer and the “PAPER LOAD METHOD”. It turns out these were instructions only and they DISABLED the paper load button. He said that he did training on these new machines but had never noticed this printer display instructions. Since all the Epson Techs know the correct sequence, they never looked at this part. He basically blamed it on the “lost in translation” bug. Epson did a follow up call the next day to make sure everything was ok. So kudos to Epson! I am a very happy camper.
Brian
