Epson 9880, Constant Cleaning

[deanwork]

I'm trying to help someone who just bought a used 9880. The printer worked fine when he bought it and it looks like new.

After bringing it home he sends a print to the machine and every time rather than outputting the file, it is printing the Epson gridded color target, and then goes into major cleaning, over and over and over again every time he sends a file to it. Mac, USB, 10.5, latest driver off the website installed.

Really odd. No error messages on the display. I deleted and reloaded the driver and that didn't help

Every now and then he was able to make the print file go through, but usually it just prints this target over and over again and purges ink.

I tried to download the latest "firmware update" to see if that would help but when I did so for Leopard 10.5, there was no install menu that I could  install it with. That was odd too.
Don't know if this firmware update would resolve this or now because I couldn't find the mechanism to install it.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

John

[Wayne Fox]

I'm trying to help someone who just bought a used 9880. The printer worked fine when he bought it and it looks like new.

After bringing it home he sends a print to the machine and every time rather than outputting the file, it is printing the Epson gridded color target, and then goes into major cleaning, over and over and over again every time he sends a file to it. Mac, USB, 10.5, latest driver off the website installed.

Really odd. No error messages on the display. I deleted and reloaded the driver and that didn't help

Every now and then he was able to make the print file go through, but usually it just prints this target over and over again and purges ink.

I tried to download the latest "firmware update" to see if that would help but when I did so for Leopard 10.5, there was no install menu that I could  install it with. That was odd too.
Don't know if this firmware update would resolve this or now because I couldn't find the mechanism to install it.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

John

Might try turning auto cleaning off ... page 137 of the user manual then manage cleaning with manual nozzle checks and manual cleaning cycles.

I haven't used a 9880 in a very long time, but there might be a menu option that automatically checks nozzles before printing prints that may need to be turned off.  I thought this was only on the 11880 and 79/9900 printers, but am not sure.

As far as firmware you need to install the Epson Printer Utility and launch it, there is an option there to update the firmware.