Epson 7900 - LLK channel clogging, banding - what a disappointment!

[dgberg]

I also had a 9900 LLK channel die on me, same experience as everyone else here, the strange part with mine was I did several prints, and the head just suddenly crapped out in the middle of them, and that was the end of it.

DecisionOne is in my opinion the least proffesional company I've ever dealt with (and my user name makes it pretty easy for anyone from Epson/DecisionOne to figure out who I am), first, I call in to Epson Tech Support and advise them of the situation, they ask me a couple questions, don't ask me to do anything on the printer, then say that they believe that the print head has died, and will have to pass my claim on to their "Nation Wide Service Provider" Decision One.

Four days go by and I still haven't heard back from anyone, so I call back in to epson and ask them what gives, as I currently have a $5000 paper weight in my office, and am less than impressed. The Epson tech says they will look in to it and call me back...two more hours later he calls back and tells me that the person that books the maintenance for Decision One is on holidays, and that's why they haven't called me (ummm...wow).

Finally I get an e-mail from decision one with a quote attached($2400 CAD). I send them an e-mail back asking when the service might be able to performed, what sort of warranty they offer on their work, and a few other questions. They fire me back another e-mail saying they aren't able to give me an estimated time for their service until I've approved the quote (WHAT?), and answer most of the other questions in a somewhat satisfactory manner (although the fact that they only warranty their service for 90 days is a little bit odd).

I send back an approval for the quote, as either way I decide that it's going to need to be repaired. Then I get back...nothing. A week goes by, and as I'm looking at my credit card statement I notice that they've already charged my credit card for the full amount, haven't talked to me, haven't seen the printer, just charged me full pop for a replacement print head plus 6 hours labor.

I call decision one, LIVID, and they say that it's standard procedure, but they'll have a tech call me.

Two days later I get a call from someone, says that he has the perfect guy for the job, he's just finished an epson training course(awesome).

A few days later the guy finally comes to service the printer, and it turns out he apparently just got out of an Epson course because before that he didn't know how to "fix" printers at all. Fortunately for him I'm not there at the time or I probably would have thrown him out, but from what my wife tells me, the guy didn't know anything about the printer, he needed to call me because he didn't know how to load paper in the printer, he was apparently constantly using the owners manual to figure out how to do things, and for some unknown reason he needed to borrow a monitor in order to work on it...wow. Then, to make it even more entertaining, he didn't have enough time to fix it. 8:00pm rolls around and he's still at our house, and he tells my wife he's going to have to come back the next day.
So at the end of the day, I get a working printer, for $2400 and change, and a good story to tell of how a company shouldn't do business.




To top it off Epson carries on with Decision One like it is some covert operation. I googled them and came up with a Decision One company with  headquarters in Devon,Pa. if thats the same one.
 To this day I am still not sure they really are a brick and morter company.
I think it may be just a name they have attached to this faux division(Legal front)and the work is just farmed out to service tech's that actually are employed by someone else.
I had a tech "Lined up through Decision One" out for a service call 3 years ago. He was from Lancaster,Pa. and I got the feeling he was actually working full time for someone else. (Just a hunch,no business card no name on the truck.)
I guess it really doesn't matter other then the more companies that are involved (Epson-Decision One - The company that the tech actually works for.) the more expensive it will be.

[Farmer]

http://www.decisionone.com/

[StevenSzabo]

http://www.decisionone.com/

That'd be them

[dgberg]

That'd be them

Thats less then an hour from my home.
Maybe I will call them and see if I can drop off one of my Epsons to have it serviced.

[Alan Goldhammer]

http://www.decisionone.com/

They were actually acquired by Glodyne, a global IT support company in 2010.  FWIW, here is a quote from the Glodyne website:  "Our innovative delivery model helps us to synchronize seamless and cost-effective solutions with assured quality to our clients."  It may be that they don't know that Decision One is not living up to their goals!  If anyone is in Mumbai, you can drop by the corporate office and lodge a complaint.

[JohnHeerema]

I also had a 9900 LLK channel die on me, same experience as everyone else here, the strange part with mine was I did several prints, and the head just suddenly crapped out in the middle of them, and that was the end of it.

DecisionOne is in my opinion the least professional company I've ever dealt with

Steven, I'm sure sorry to read about your experience, as well as the experience of everyone here who has experienced LLK failures. I would be interested to follow up on the poll, to see how widespread this issue might be. Since I live close to you, and also own a 9900, it seems rather probable that I will have a chance to meet the super-tech who serviced your 9900!

I find myself curious about the relationship between Epson and DecisionOne. I've read quite a bit about DecisionOne in these pages, and I don't offhand recall reading about a single positive experience. Epson seems to support them very strongly, both by maintaining an exclusive relationship with them, and by making it impossible for anyone else to purchase parts. The question I always have when I look at a  business relationship, is "who benefits from it?".

[Alan Goldhammer]

I find myself curious about the relationship between Epson and DecisionOne. I've read quite a bit about DecisionOne in these pages, and I don't offhand recall reading about a single positive experience. Epson seems to support them very strongly, both by maintaining an exclusive relationship with them, and by making it impossible for anyone else to purchase parts. The question I always have when I look at a  business relationship, is "who benefits from it?".

It's really quite straightforward when you go to their website.  They are the contractor for Epson for doing repairs and it's likely Epson have chosen this approach as opposed to maintaining their own trained field service staff.  The key issue here is whether there are other outfits around that can provide a similar service.  What approaches do HP and Canon take for their large format printers?

For those who have used DecisionOne, do they charge extra for travel to the site or is that part of the service fee?

It will be interesting to see what the survey turns up and what % of the Epson installed base have encountered such problems.  I don't think we know that number.

[JohnHeerema]

It's really quite straightforward when you go to their website.  They are the contractor for Epson for doing repairs and it's likely Epson have chosen this approach as opposed to maintaining their own trained field service staff.

Exclusivity is an interesting business relationship. What I have seen in other business relationships, is that the recipient of an exclusive relationship typically pays for that privilege: often very handsomely. The grantor gets the benefit of a simplified business relationship, but since their reputation is linked to that of their contractor, they face two risks: a risk of dissatisfied customers turning away from the brand, and a legal anti-trust risk. They seem to be most common where the supplier perceives themselves to have an effective market monopoly.

The grantor gets cash from the exclusive contractor, which is a short-term benefit, along with a simplified business relationship. The grantee is able to increase their revenue from customers via high billing rates and parts margins, and may be able to substantially reduce their personnel training costs.

The grantor faces long-term risks, but may feel that they can ameliorate them by terminating the exclusive relationship when they see reduced sales revenue due to deterioration of the brand value.   

My own $.02 here, is that companies often mistakenly assume the above to be linear cost-benefit relationships. I think that the evidence indicates that there are sudden jumps in the curves - that customers will put up with a surprising amount for some time, and then abandon a brand en masse when an alternative appears. As an example, consider Quark, the makers of a once-dominant desktop publishing software product. Famous for their poor customer service, Quark felt comfortable in their market dominance. When Adobe offered an alternative, Quark's market position evaporated almost overnight.

I'm presenting this as an example case only. I do not know that this specifically applies to Seiko Epson and DecisionOne.

[Farmer]

If you actually search these forums, there are plenty of positive comments about Decision One and Epson America in general in terms of service and support.  No one remembers the good things, though.

More to the point, people don't generally go out of their way to post on a forum when something good happens (or more so when something simply happens "as it should"), so any poll conducted here (for any manufacturer, service company, etc) is going to be very much skewed.

What I would recommend is that where you have bad service, by all means come here and talk about it, but make a point of telling Epson and Decision One or whatever company/manufacturer it might be.  You might think you're not being listened to, but I bet you are.  I bet that the information is being collected and reviewed - it just might not result in any immediate changes or even none at all if your case is an exception - but the only way to ever get things to change is to send polite, constructive and factual information to those concerned.

As soon as you become angry, vitriolic, sarcastic, smart-ass etc then your correspondence loses significant impact (usually it ends up having no impact at all).  Similarly, demanding x, y or z gets you no where.  The people working for these companies are just like you and me - trying to earn a living and be good people.  Sure, there may well be exceptions, but if you think it's their job to put up with us abusing them or carrying on like dick heads - you're wrong (which is not to say that people in this thread are like that - I'm just making general comments about the way these matters are often raised or handled).

[EMay]

Agree Farmer, but having just bought a 7900 this thread scares the crap out of me. :]

[chaddro]

Agree Farmer, but having just bought a 7900 this thread scares the crap out of me. :]

I can understand your concern. I Bought my 9890 last August. At the time, 750 for an extended warranty seemed an awful lot. I've had a 4000, and still have my 3800 and 7800. They all work flawlessly. I did buy extended warranties for the 4000, but never had cause to use it. I was actually considering foregoing the cost, but this thread really give me pause. However, my Yellow and LLK have been .... misbehaving. No other channel drops out like these, and no other channel has ever needed more than a single paired cleaning.

Now, I did buy my 9890 with my AmEx, so I do have an extra year's "coverage" (they reimburse you repair costs, or replace/refund if hopeless), but I'll have to call them to see how much of a repair is covered.

I wonder. If this is truly a wide spread known factory defect, if a class action suit would not be in order?

@Alexandra

Did the 7900/9900 printers get a firmware update recently? When I was talking with the tech over my issues just the other week, I was told that one of the recent firmware updates provided paired power cleaning along with better cartridge recognition fixes.

However, from what I've read of your experiences, you have what I think is called ink starvation. In other words, you don't have a clog, just no ink at the nozzle! These printer have a complicated pressurized system to get ink to the head. They need that to keep up with the speed at which it prints. If you have a pressurization issue, or air leak in your LLK channel, then you will never have ink at the head. And the way you described it gradually getting worse the more you used it, really leads me to think you need to see if you can replace the damper, and check the line connections. This is easy to do on a 4000/x800 series. No idea on the new x900 though.

Hope you get your machine up and running. What a nightmare, for sure!

[davidh202]

Now, I did buy my 9890 with my AmEx, so I do have an extra year's "coverage" (they reimburse you repair costs, or replace/refund if hopeless), but I'll have to call them to see how much of a repair is covered.

Yes that is true of many charge card extras and should be looked into if you have used a chage to purchase your machine.

I wonder. If this is truly a wide spread known factory defect, if a class action suit would not be in order?
Good luck even if it's true it has to be proven and the chance of anything close to full restituion for expenses is very slim.
Epson went through a class action suit a number of years ago in California over excessive ink replacement and misrepresentation of volume left in the carts on certain models.
The restitution in that case was one free replacement cart for the tens or more you might have purchased ,and a heck of alot of red tape to prove you should be entitled to it.
@Alexandra

Did the 7900/9900 printers get a firmware update recently? When I was talking with the tech over my issues just the other week, I was told that one of the recent firmware updates provided paired power cleaning along with better cartridge recognition fixes.
Yes, in the US it was released 11/30/2011...

Firmware Update version HN030B9
Windows 7 32-bit, Windows 7 64-bit, Windows Vista 32-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows XP 32-bit, Windows XP 64-bit
 epson14555.exe - 4.6MB - posted on 11/30/11
This file contains Firmware Update version HN030B9. This file extracts to your hard drive and is placed in a folder that begins with C:\epson\epson14555…
 
This update contains the following improvements: •Corrects intermittent ink cartridge recognition issues.
 •Adds "Execute(Powerful)" option to the "Clean Color Pairs" menu in the control panel.
 The Remote Panel 2 Utility, also downloadable from this page, should be used to apply this firmware update.

However, from what I've read of your experiences, you have what I think is called ink starvation. In other words, you don't have a clog, just no ink at the nozzle!
My recent experience bears that out for sure..
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=57275.msg492973#msg492973

[chaddro]

Alexandra,

There is a company selling dampers for the 9xxx series printers on ebay. The dampers are about 20 bucks each. This might be an options for you if you feel up to the task. A failed damper would cause just the sort of problems you are having. Phone is 855-238-3427

[DeanChriss]

Agree Farmer, but having just bought a 7900 this thread scares the crap out of me. :]

FWIW, I've had an Epson 7900 since December 2008 and it's still running fine. I won't claim there aren't a few quirks, but in general I'm quite happy with it.

[Farmer]

Agree Farmer, but having just bought a 7900 this thread scares the crap out of me. :]

It's not that you should ignore things read on the net, but they must be taken into perspective and I would let it concern you overly.  As I mentioned, the percentage of people who bad experiences who post messages compared to the percentage of people who have good or OK experiences is probably several orders of magnitude different :-)

[SpiritShooter]

I have had my Epson 7900 now for almost 2 years. No problems or issues (knock on wood).  Occasional clog that a normal cleaning cycle clears. I also have a 9900 that has so far not provided any issues but it is only a few months old.

SS

[dgberg]

My biggest issue with Decision One is the charged hourly rate.
Its a friggin printer for gosh sakes! $150.00 an hour?
I have had multiple businesses over the years so I know all about service charges and keeping equipment properly maintained. It is part of business,but!
For example my fulltime day job for 39 years has been flying a corporate jet. Expensive to buy,expensive to run and expensive to maintain.
But the hourly service rate that Cessna Citation Service charges to work on this 7 million dollar airplane is $100 an hour.
I also run my own cabinetry business for the past 25 years and have had the servicemen here a dozen times or more to work on my widebelt sander,straightline rip, moulder and panel saw.
Service rate $75.00 an hour.
So you see what I am getting at.  Decision One charges the high rate not because there overhead is sky high or there serviceman are paid 100k a year.  They charge it because they are the only game in town and they can get away with it.
I guess as the saying goes "It is what it is".

[Burnsides]

My take is that you cannot even buy the parts to fix the printer yourself.. It's $2K in parts + the 175 an hour(in my area).. +100 for travel.. It's not that hard to replace the print head. It just takes time..

[149113]

Saw this thread on a Google search as I have been considering the 9890 or the 9900. Question... does the 9890 suffer the same issues that have been listed for the 7900/9900?

[davidh202]

Since the technology is the same ,minus 2 channels it can suffer from the same issues....BUT
don't let that discourage you! Epson is not out to deliberately screw everyone. ;-)

These are very fine printers to say the least, and as Farmer has said, the reports of issues on the www are most likely a very small percentage of actual machines in use in the real world.These are made to be used, not to sit idle for long periods.
For more peace of mind buy with a credit card that adds an extra year to the warantee, and forget the extra cost of an extended warantee