Ferp
I've had problems with the fine art paper feeding methods since the very beginning. Doing it as they suggests has never really worked, so I've adopted what Mark Segal has suggested which is feeding fine art from the rear, then fiddling with it so it will come out the front on top of the fine art tray rather than where it wants to go, which is below that tray. Then line it up with the front of the fine art tray, hit LOAD, then print the image. None the less, that is not what sent it in to the repair shop to see if they can save it.
It has started leaving ink smears/blotches along one edge of the paper path. Not every time but maybe, one out of 3 or 4 prints. I was printing a big bunch of Red River pecos gloss 7x10 greeting cards, (one by one....this paper feed can't correctly extract 1 sheet from a thoroughly fanned and riffled stack of 10 sheets in the top sheet feeder. After about 15 cards, I started getting a black glob of ink in the margin of the sheet at the right hand edge of the paper as well as some apparent slight blemishes into the image/surface next to the blob. I've cleaned the head with the folded paper towel soaked in cleaner in the lower track once before with AOK results. I did it again this time. Same print problem - didn't work. I cleaned it again, seemingly the same way with no obvious problem. When I tried my next print, it jammed, the printer started making terrible sounds and I scrambled to pull the plug. When I pulled the paper out, the paper was all chewed up. Tried to print again, same results. I must have done something to the head or the track/feed mechanism under the head.
I recognize that I probably did something really bad when I tried to clean it. But it was unusable with ink blobs, smudging and slight print abrasions. I know that Epson warns us not to clean the heads and it will void the warranty, but what are we supposed to do when the prints coming out of the printer have ink blobs and streaking? I had a 3800 for 9 years and it was great. Occassional nozzle clean and it always worked. Not my P800. Oh and by the way, I returned my first P800 under warranty to Epson because of inconsistent paper feeding. Epson replaced it with this one.
Brad