Epson SC9000 general questions

[Paul2660]

My 6 year old 9900 finally developed a clog that was not going to clear, and looking at 3.5K to replace head and dampers (quote from Decision One) I made the hard decision to move to the SC9000.  I am in the process of setting up the 9000 and have read back about 20 pages in this forum and have found some good info, but still have a few questions on best practices. 

Briefly, my print volume is about 2 rolls of canvas and 1 50' roll of paper about every  2 months.  This is an average as it can go much higher with certain jobs. 
With the 9900 I had ANC off, due to all the issues that it caused.  Due to my location, in Arkansas, during the summer it's not advisable to just leave a print on, as local thunderstorms could easily have a local hit which would do possible irrevocable damage to the printer or PC's.  Understand I am on a UPS, but no UPS within $$ reason will stop a near strike by lightening.  So when I am out and storms are possible, printer is powered off and unplugged. 

My 9900 was a clogging wonder, almost always had something showing clogged when first nozzle check of the day was run.  Did not matter if printer had been powered on and idle or powered off for a few days.  My process to clear these was always to run a check, determine the problem colors, then power off and back on coming up in Service mode.  Once in Service mode, I would run pairs cleaning, usually CL1 sometimes CL2 was needed, but I always got a clean pattern.  Then I powered off, and came up in normal mode to print for the day.

With the 9000 I see that ANC is different even off it still appears to run a ANC process if the printer is powered off.  I can't get around that I guess, but did wan to know the following:

1.  Can you still get to the Service mode the same way as the 9900 and does it offer the same CL1-CL4 pairs cleaning?
2.  The 9900 also had a Maintenance mode, I assume you can also get to that with the 9000.  The 9900 required a power on with different buttons held down
     but you could do a SS cleaning in Maintenance mode and SSCL from Service mode. 
3.  Since ANC appears to always run on a power up, should that process be stopped, and then go to Service mode to run pairs?  CL1 etc. With the 9900 ANC
     just never seemed to get anywhere but used a ton of ink.

Odds are this machine will not be switched to Matte ink as I still have good old 7800 going strong set to matte which covers my needs there. 

Any ideas or steps that others currently using the 9000 or 7000 are doing would be greatly appreciated. 

Paul C

[Wayne Fox]

Service mode and maintenance mode are substantially different on the p9000.  Most of the utility in those seems to be gone.  I haven’t found a way to do manual cleans on those, so the level 1-4 cleaning ability seems to be gone. I also haven’t found a way to do a SS cleaning, but then I’ve never needed to so I haven’t looked very hard.  Mine rarely cleans when I turn it on, but I do leave mine on most of the time.  However, it does go to sleep, and when it wakes up if it’s been asleep long enough it will still do an ANC and clean if necessary.

I’ve “heard” auto cleaning is logical and uses pairs cleaning when possible, but I have no clue if that’s accurate or not.

I’ve had the p9000 for over 2.5 years now, and it seems to require far less ink to keep it going.  Occasionally a small section of missing nozzles, I’ve had one time now it required me to do a “powerful” clean on a channel to free it up, but for the most part it seems to do really well.  Just barely had to install a new maintenance tank, so quite a bit of printing with on the first tank (which fills up quite a bit with the init fill).

[Paul2660]

Thanks Wayne.

Do you run the powerful clean from the standard menu? And is by pairs or a full cycle clean.

Paul C

[Wayne Fox]

Thanks Wayne.

Do you run the powerful clean from the standard menu? And is by pairs or a full cycle clean.

Paul C

yes, powerful clean is an option in the standard cleaning menu, and is available for pairs or for a full head clean.

[Paul2660]

Thanks Wayne, for the info. 

I was surprised also to see Epson no longer ships a owners manual, the spiral bound style, instead it appears it has to be downloaded from Epson.  I did not use my manual on a daily basis, but it was nice to have it right by the printer when something did come up where I needed to reference it.

Seems to be more and more the style today, even for a 5K printer. 

Paul C

[Ken Doo]

Hi Paul,

I didn't have much trouble at all with my old 9900----and the new P9000 is better yet. I've had my P9000 for well over two years now, and it has been flawless and trouble-free. (knock on wood  )   It simply is a better printer.

The only PITA is that Epson in their wisdom has locked their printers down with new computer chips/motherboard to prevent use of third party inks. The result also is that you can no longer recycle and re-wad your maintenance tanks----even though they use the exact same tanks going back to the old 9800.  I just gave away about a half dozen new and recycled tanks for my old 9900 and 9890.  No more chip re-setters.  I wouldn't use third party inks anyway, save for Jon Cone's B&W Piezography.   Too bad as Epson doesn't offer anything that Jon Cone is doing for B&W printing.

And really---you should try the matte black on the P9000. It is noticeably better than what you will get with your old 7800 or even the 9900.  You're going to love your new P9000.   

Ken

[dgberg]

I think it will come Ken, just no idea when.
The reason I purchased the P8000 instead of the P9000 is because you can purchase refillables with one use chip.
I converted the printer to dye sublimation inks from new.
They still do not have a chip for the green, orange or violet so the P9000 cannot presently be used with refillables.
The chips are not resettable, you just snap a new chip on the cart when it shows empty.
$20 each. These are 700 ml carts.
I made several profiles and the output is as good or better then my previous 4880 which used Sawgrass ink.
The big kicker in all this is Sawgrass ink was $1.40 per ml and the ink owl is .11 per ml.
The P8000 is a speed demon. Seems twice as fast as my 9890 and 9900.