It not just cat hair. It's all kind of dust and debris plus accumulated ink build up on the head surface that may or may not have anything to do with cleanliness in the environment. You mentioned paper dust coming from Canson Platine paper being problematic to your Epson 4900 in another thread. The enduser can't run a printer in a class 100 clean room, and it wouldn't work anyway if the media is a source of the debris. Canon and HP have a simple fix. The enduser can easily replace the print heads. Yes, it's not cheap to replace a Canon print head (HP not as bad), but it's a fixed cost one can factor into the total cost of ownership, and it gets the job done without having to send the printer in for service that will generate some unknown cost for repairs not to mention all the down time. Epson piezo heads are clearly different than HP and Canon thermal heads, and to date, they are not easily replaceable in the field without an expensive Epson repair guy coming on site or the printer being sent back to a service center. IMHO, Epson needs to evaluate various technical options that could be implemented in new printer models to be more competitive in this particular vulnerability which otherwise is admittedly common to all inkjet printers.
Yup - largely correct. However, I can't believe Epson hasn't evaluated everything the competition is doing, yet they sustain their piezo-electric head technology. I've heard it's because they are of the view that it delivers the finest, most accurate results achievable with inkjet technology to date. As you know, technological choice always involves compromises and they've decided on theirs. If they were losing market share in spades to Canon in HP because of this I should expect they would have reconceptualized the printhead by now; but the fact they haven't, I suppose one can say is the market speaking. I've had some extensive discussion with one of the most experienced and knowledgeable technical people on inkjet printers - he services them all: Epson Canon, Roland, Mutoh, etc.) - does not work for Epson. He advised that the most frequent source of clogging by far is the cleaning and capping mechanism, not the printhead. He tells me that the need for head replacement is very unusual, but replacing the pump/cap/wiper assembly is more frequent and usually fixes these problems. If you do have a head failure on an Epson printer, however, you do not want servicemen or head replacement - can end-up more expensive than a new printer, which comes with ink and a warranty. All that said, I would dearly love to see a model that has the reliability of a 3880 and the gamut of a 4900. That would be one helluva machine!
