I recently purchased an Epson 3880. Everything was working fine until a couple days ago when prints I made clearly had a very strong color shift. All the ink cartridges still showed plenty of ink. I did a Nozzle Check and not surprisingly (given the color shift)
no Light Vivid Magenta was printing. Strange, I thought, but after not being able to find anything else wrong with it, I decided to do a head cleaning. No luck. Tried another, still no luck. Tried the Auto Nozzle Check (which also cleans if necessary), it declared defeat. Tried a Power Cleaning. S t i l l n o l u c k!
In an act of desperation, I opened the ink cartridges cover and removed the Light Vivid Magenta cartridge. It was suspiciously light and when I shook it, it clearly had just a tiny amount of ink in it. I removed a few other cartridges just to be sure I wasn't imagining anything, and sure enough, the rest were much heavier and there was a great deal more ink that sloshed around when shook. When I reinserted the cartridges and closed the cartridge door, the ink cartridges still reported the same amount of ink as before (in particular the LVM cartridge showed a substantial amount of ink, albeit less than before all the cleanings
).
So I have two mysteries:
1) Why would a cartridge show
far more ink than was really there? We're not talking about being off by 10%; we're talking about being off by 70%.
2) How could it be that the printer would suddenly run out of a particular ink? (I'd not used that ink in any special way.)
Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Can anyone shed any light on either of these mysteries?
I've not yet called Epson (it's the weekend), but I will tomorrow - should be interesting to hear what they say.
Thanks for any help anyone can provide,
John.
