I suspect that a lot of these situations with Epson's are caused by crud and caked ink on the print head surface rather than internally clogged nozzles. If you are about to trash the printer, there's nothing to lose by physically cleaning the print head surface. The technique is to shut the printer off, turn it back on, and quickly pull the plug. That leaves the carriage head free to move along the rails. Then dose a baby wet wipe (they are nicely lint-free) with a liberal amount of windex. Place it on the platten, and gently push the head over the wet wipe. Leave it there for a while if you like. Then slide the head past the wet wipe and you will be surprised how much ink is on it! "Rinse and repeat" with a new wet wipe until it is only showing fresh clean ink spots, not all the black gook. At that point, start your printer up, do a nozzle check, and maybe it will call for another cleaning cycle, but you should begin to see real progress. You might still need one more or two more rounds with baby wipes, but I've managed to rescue both an Epson 3880 and a Surecolor P400 with this technique. They would have gone to the trash otherwise since neither was responding to repeated and very ink wasteful cleaning cycles. The P400, for example, was showing a stubborn red ink channel with only half of the red channel firing properly, as if half the nozzles all in a row were totally dead, and unresponsive to the normal heavy cleaning cycle despite brand new red ink cartridge. But the wet wipe technique and a little patience brought it back from the dead! The 3880 had a cat hair stuck in the gunk! No amount of Epson printer progressive cleaning cycles was going to dislodge that cat hair, but the wet wipe did.