Epson 3880 Cleaning

[tsapiano]

I picked up this printer earlier this summer and it's been a great unit with no signs of nozzle clogs and haven't yet needed to run a single cleaning cycle.  The other day, however, when I switched it on to make a couple of prints it unilaterally decided to clean itself and burn through a bunch of ink.  It's never had a clog, and it made some prints a few days before without issue so I'm not entirely sure what prompted it to do this?  That is, is this just a preventative procedure that the printer performs periodically (looking at my records, this is the first time it was switched on after crossing 6 months since initial charging) or does it have some sort of sensor that detected a clog and just went ahead and corrected it (I didn't print a nozzle check, so it would have to pick it up some other way)?  If the former, is there any way to switch it off as it kind of seems like a waste when there is no problem with the heads?  Not so much a complaint as the 2200 it replaced probably wasted just as much ink cleaning out periodic clogs (even including this, my net ink costs are a lot lower), but I'm hoping to get a better understanding of how exactly this printer manages stuff like this as the older unit would never initiate a clean without me explicitly telling it to do so.

For reference, the cleaning process initiated as soon as I pressed the power button to switch it on.  In addition, it also used up a bit of the matte black ink (~3%) in the process even though I've never used it (it was charged for photo black and haven't had occasion to use the matte yet).

[Farmer]

Given it was around 6 months, it may have been a forced PK-MK change to run a clean on that line.  If you don't switch very often then the printer will do a switch now and then to ensure that the unused line remains in good condition.

[Mark D Segal]

Apart from what Phil mentions above, I believe the manual has instructions on how to manage the degree of automation for cleaning cycles.

[Farmer]

Not for the 3880, unfortunately.  It doesn't have the same level of options as, say, the 4900:

http://support2.epson.net/manuals/english/lfp/styluspro38803885/ug/html/index.htm

[tsapiano]

Given it was around 6 months, it may have been a forced PK-MK change to run a clean on that line.  If you don't switch very often then the printer will do a switch now and then to ensure that the unused line remains in good condition.

I hadn't thought about the line between the matte cartridge and the valve drying out over time, but now that you mention it that kind of makes sense.  I was waiting for an opportunity to do a batch of matte prints so as to minimize the waste, but I guess if it needs to do it periodically then I should be a little more liberal about doing occasional prints.  Just would have been nice to have a warning, as if it was going to do the switch I would have liked to make some matte prints before it switched back (when the cleaning was complete, it was automatically back in photo black mode so it made the round trip).

With that said, I suspect that it was a bit more than that as it used ink from all of the cartridges?  Photo black and all of the colours were about the same (~6%), matte black was about half as much (3%).


Either way, as Mark suggests I'll take another look at the manual as well.  I thought I read through that pretty thoroughly before using the printer (was back-ordered for a couple of weeks so downloaded and read through it), but there may have been stuff that I missed without the context of having used the printer.

Thanks for the help!

[KirbyKrieger]

I have a 3880 which has performed flawlessly for about 2 years of light use.  I never print with photo black ink, but have, through user blunder and auto-maintenance, used ¾ of a photo-black cartridge.

I haven't tried to "outsmart" the printer in any way.  I assume it has more accurate self-tests than I can administer, and am happy to balance the cost of auto-maintenance against the gain in "flawlessness".  YM, as has been much bruited on LuLa recently, MV.

Fwiw, I also print on a 9800 I rent by the hour.  That printer has conniptions if there's a pea in the building, let alone under its platen.

I haven't augmented your understanding, but I do hope I've given you some leave to ignore the printer and spend your time on the prints.  A trouble-free printer, at the cost of semi-annual self-cleaning, is a sturdy work-horse.  Use it and write-off the carrots.

Kirby.

[Mark D Segal]

OK Phil, didn't realize that - I suppose I'm too accustomed to my 4900!  :-)

[Dale_Cotton2]

I picked up this printer earlier this summer and it's been a great unit with no signs of nozzle clogs and haven't yet needed to run a single cleaning cycle.

Few printer models will clog during first year or two if used at least lightly.

The other day, however, when I switched it on to make a couple of prints it unilaterally decided to clean itself and burn through a bunch of ink.  It's never had a clog, and it made some prints a few days before without issue so I'm not entirely sure what prompted it to do this?  That is, is this just a preventative procedure that the printer performs periodically (looking at my records, this is the first time it was switched on after crossing 6 months since initial charging)

My theory is that the 3880, like the 3800 before it, and probably all other similar models, has at least two preventive maintenance triggers. If you let the printer sit idle for more than X days you'll get an automatic self-clean when you do a print job. This self-clean will be along the same line as what you get when you initiate a self-clean from the driver or from the LCD panel. The other sort of preventative maintenance event seems to occur on an independent schedule and lasts longer. I had one of these at what may well have been the 6-month point. I don't recall it kicking in when I turned on the printer instead of when I initiated a print job, but it may well have done so. Based on my prior 3800 experience these deeper maintenance events definitely use ink from both PK and MK. I don't recall them using as much as the 3 and 6 percent per cartridge you report, but perhaps they do.

or does it have some sort of sensor that detected a clog and just went ahead and corrected it (I didn't print a nozzle check, so it would have to pick it up some other way)?

Pretty sure Epson printers can't do this.

If the former, is there any way to switch it off as it kind of seems like a waste when there is no problem with the heads?  Not so much a complaint as the 2200 it replaced probably wasted just as much ink cleaning out periodic clogs (even including this, my net ink costs are a lot lower), but I'm hoping to get a better understanding of how exactly this printer manages stuff like this as the older unit would never initiate a clean without me explicitly telling it to do so.

For reference, the cleaning process initiated as soon as I pressed the power button to switch it on.  In addition, it also used up a bit of the matte black ink (~3%) in the process even though I've never used it (it was charged for photo black and haven't had occasion to use the matte yet).

Upshot seems to be: if you don't use up a certain minimum amount of ink over a certain maximum period of time the 3880 will use it for you, so you may as well get some benefit from those ink dollars by making actual prints. I've been printing pretty frequently since I got the 3880, but did let it sit for four or five days without a self-clean event occurring. If I found I had nothing to print for longer than that, I'd do at least a single smallish print, anyhow. Since I almost never print MK, thanks to Farmer's theory, I just put an alarm in my organizer to do an MK print in April, which is when five months will have elapsed from a recent MK job I did for a watercolour painter.

[tsapiano]

My theory is that the 3880, like the 3800 before it, and probably all other similar models, has at least two preventive maintenance triggers. If you let the printer sit idle for more than X days you'll get an automatic self-clean when you do a print job. This self-clean will be along the same line as what you get when you initiate a self-clean from the driver or from the LCD panel. The other sort of preventative maintenance event seems to occur on an independent schedule and lasts longer. I had one of these at what may well have been the 6-month point. I don't recall it kicking in when I turned on the printer instead of when I initiated a print job, but it may well have done so. Based on my prior 3800 experience these deeper maintenance events definitely use ink from both PK and MK. I don't recall them using as much as the 3 and 6 percent per cartridge you report, but perhaps they do.

The longest it has sat idle so far was for 23 days and it didn't need any sort of self-cleaning after that (ink percentages were identical, and consumption of the prints was in line with those done before) as I had a bit of a lull after an initial rush of printing everything I had queued up after first getting the printer.  Since then it's been used pretty regularly, although it does commonly sit idle for a week or so here and there.  The last couple of months has been busier, however, so it's been getting a pretty good workout.

Pretty sure Epson printers can't do this.

That's what I figured, just wanted to make sure something else wasn't going on here.

Upshot seems to be: if you don't use up a certain minimum amount of ink over a certain maximum period of time the 3880 will use it for you, so you may as well get some benefit from those ink dollars by making actual prints. I've been printing pretty frequently since I got the 3880, but did let it sit for four or five days without a self-clean event occurring. If I found I had nothing to print for longer than that, I'd do at least a single smallish print, anyhow. Since I almost never print MK, thanks to Farmer's theory, I just put an alarm in my organizer to do an MK print in April, which is when five months will have elapsed from a recent MK job I did for a watercolour painter.

Makes sense, if it's going to blow that ink out one way or the other I'd much rather put it on paper than into a sponge.  Just trying to wrap my head around what exactly the printer is thinking so I know how much (and of what) I need to do to avoid/minimize it.  Was just taken aback by the volume of ink that the printer discharged in one sitting having being used so recently and not showing any signs of trouble.  With that said, this printer was naturally designed for doing far more volume than I'm accustomed to printing so that may be part of the issue.  I bought it because between the glowing reviews, amount of included ink and the rebate offered when I got it, it made little sense to buy the smaller printers explicitly targeted at my volumes.  With that said, I've kept detailed logs of consumption so far in order to help characterize my costs over the long term, and even accounting for this on a six month interval they are far lower than the printer it replaces (although this cleaning naturally closed the gap by a decent amount).  Because of that I've been doing more (and bigger) prints than I was before, but it looks like I might have to step up that game a little further

Either way, I will certainly have to experiment a bit further to get used to the quirks of this unit.  Eventually with time one gets used to these things and builds them into the cost structure, but it's still a bit shocking to watch the machine burn through $30 of ink (that could have made a lot of prints) without warning or permission.  I had the 2200 since it's initial launch, so with time I figured out little tricks to work around it's oddities and I guess this printer will require a bit of a learning curve to do the same.  I just wish Epson would be a little more detailed in their documentation about care and feeding so we didn't have to figure out all of this stuff on our own

[Dale_Cotton2]

Both the 23 days not followed by a self-clean and the $30 one-time mega-clean blow away all my experience going back to 4000, 3800, then 3880. My best guess for first is that the printer was still relatively new and Epson is confident enough in the new 3880 tech that it scales back on non-use cleanings during the first X months of the printer's life. My best guess for second is that the printer found something anomalous during its power-on self-check that caused it to freak out.

Just occurred to me that the anomalous event could have been a power spike. I had so much trouble with that years ago (living a few miles from a nuclear power plant) that I invested in a really good line-conditioning UPS.

***

As a side issue, I haven't been able to get the resident ink usage monitoring app to work on a Windows machine in many years so don't have access to the detailed numbers you have. Assuming you're printing to an RC or gloss baryta paper, I'd appreciate any estimate you could give for the number of mm of ink you're seeing used per sq inch of photo-content print area. Years ago when the app did run for me I could calculate that by adding up the mm on all channels for a given job then dividing by the sq inch of print area on the sheet of paper for that job. My number from maybe six or seven years ago is 0.87 ml per 100 sq in of print area. But I was probably doing mostly matte paper printing back then.

[tsapiano]

Both the 23 days not followed by a self-clean and the $30 one-time mega-clean blow away all my experience going back to 4000, 3800, then 3880. My best guess for first is that the printer was still relatively new and Epson is confident enough in the new 3880 tech that it scales back on non-use cleanings during the first X months of the printer's life. My best guess for second is that the printer found something anomalous during its power-on self-check that caused it to freak out.

Just occurred to me that the anomalous event could have been a power spike. I had so much trouble with that years ago (living a few miles from a nuclear power plant) that I invested in a really good line-conditioning UPS.

It's been hooked up to a APC SmartUPS 1500VA with automatic voltage regulation (variable tap transformer) since I got it, as it's cheap insurance for an expensive piece of equipment.  Had a lightning strike many years ago and the stuff hooked up to UPSes was the only electronics that survived, so pretty much every piece of computer equipment in the building is now hooked up to one.  With that said, there may be other things or, as you mentioned in your previous post, it may simply require a certain ink volume in a given time period to prevent the ink in the lines from clogging up.  The less one uses it, the bigger the autonomous cleaning cycle ends up being kind of makes sense.

As a side issue, I haven't been able to get the resident ink usage monitoring app to work on a Windows machine in many years so don't have access to the detailed numbers you have. Assuming you're printing to an RC or gloss baryta paper, I'd appreciate any estimate you could give for the number of mm of ink you're seeing used per sq inch of photo-content print area. Years ago when the app did run for me I could calculate that by adding up the mm on all channels for a given job then dividing by the sq inch of print area on the sheet of paper for that job. My number from maybe six or seven years ago is 0.87 ml per 100 sq in of print area. But I was probably doing mostly matte paper printing back then.

Wasn't aware there was a utility for it, as I'm just recording the numbers the printer gives me into a spreadsheet with logs of printed area.  It's a bit of a PITA manually transferring the data over, but it seems like a good idea to track it in the near term so I know what my costs are.  I'll have to look for that utility and see if I can get it to work, as if there is a way to mechanize this it would certainly make things a lot simpler  Either way, it beats the heck out of the 2200 that didn't really give me any usable information so I'd have to tally the costs of ink cartridges and try to backsolve from there - worked out reasonably well, but it needed very long recording windows and provided no way to divide printing and maintenance numbers.

So far the 3880 has worked out to about 1.04mL/100sq-in with the bulk of that on Epson's Lustre paper and a few prints on Epson Semi-Gloss.  Many of those were full-bleed prints so those numbers don't take into account the overspray (I send the files to print with a 1/8" bleed, but I'm not sure how much of that the printer actually uses).  There is a degree of error there as it only reports to a precision of 1/10th of a mL, but I record (a) the reported usage, (b) the printer's running total and (c) the percentages after each print job and the three line up pretty well in aggregate.  With that said, I don't know that I have enough data as of yet as many of those prints were of similar subject matter so that could potentially be skewing the results a little.  Have been meaning to try some other types of paper, but with the new printer I figured that I'd get used to it's nuances before adding more variables into the mix.

[Farmer]

A couple of things.

Really, the 3880/3800 really does do a "purge the unused black" (referring to either PK or MK as appropriate) cleaning process.  That's very likely what was seen.  You would have had an ink change to the other black, a cleaning cycle, and then a switch back and maybe another clean which would pretty much tally for the ink used.  It doesn't happen very often, of course.

Epson printers with AID (the *900 series and later) (and, actually, the old 10600 going back many years) do indeed check for clogs using an electro-static sensor and can run cleans etc accordingly.  This is what Mark was referring to when he mentioned settings to control how/when/etc the printer does this and handles it.

[tsapiano]

Really, the 3880/3800 really does do a "purge the unused black" (referring to either PK or MK as appropriate) cleaning process.  That's very likely what was seen.  You would have had an ink change to the other black, a cleaning cycle, and then a switch back and maybe another clean which would pretty much tally for the ink used.  It doesn't happen very often, of course.

Good to know.  So if I perodically print on both media it should avoid this scenario?  Certainly cheaper to do a $5 round trip once and a while and get a few prints out of it than spend 6X that for nothing.

Epson printers with AID (the *900 series and later) (and, actually, the old 10600 going back many years) do indeed check for clogs using an electro-static sensor and can run cleans etc accordingly.  This is what Mark was referring to when he mentioned settings to control how/when/etc the printer does this and handles it.

Sounds like a good setup.

[Farmer]

Yeah, if you're printing both MK and PK you should be fine.  Saving up to run sets is the way to go, just don't save up for too long :-)

As to the cost?  That obviously changes for each user, but generally ink is one of the smaller cost components of producing prints (compared to media, time, capital equipment and so on).  Not wasting ink and money - definitely important - but needs to be kept in perspective of the overall costs (where there may be other areas for savings).

[hugowolf]

"or does it have some sort of sensor that detected a clog and just went ahead and corrected it (I didn't print a nozzle check, so it would have to pick it up some other way)?"

Pretty sure Epson printers can't do this.

My 9890 somehow can. I don't know what mechanism is uses to do so. It has stopped btween prints and declared a clog and asked if I want to do a cleaning.

Brian A

[Farmer]

Brian - as per above, it's the AID mechanism doing that.

[hugowolf]

Brian - as per above, it's the AID mechanism doing that.

Strange, I posted that much earlier than the time stamp shows. I don't know what happened there.

How does the AID system work? I have had perfectly clean nozzle check prints, but the printer still reporting a clog.

Brian A

[jrsforums]

Strange, I posted that much earlier than the time stamp shows. I don't know what happened there.

How does the AID system work? I have had perfectly clean nozzle check prints, but the printer still reporting a clog.

Brian A

I had that a few times on the 4900, when manually doing the auto nozzle check.  I ignored it as I did not expect it would show on prints as it had not shown on the printed nozzle check.  Eventually, it will either clear or show up on print pattern.

I suspect that the AID checking either sees things that don't show up on the print or is slightly error prone.  Either way....

John

[Farmer]

It's extremely sensitive.  It can detect a droplet deformation which you can't see to the naked eye (a strong loupe may show it if you know what you're looking for and the right dot to focus on...).

That's why the default setting of "warn, but don't stop and don't clean" is usuall most effective.  It can highlight to you that something might be amiss and you can check - if you're happy, keep going; if not, then run a clean.

[jrsforums]

It's extremely sensitive.  It can detect a droplet deformation which you can't see to the naked eye (a strong loupe may show it if you know what you're looking for and the right dot to focus on...).

That's why the default setting of "warn, but don't stop and don't clean" is usuall most effective.  It can highlight to you that something might be amiss and you can check - if you're happy, keep going; if not, then run a clean.

Thanks for the info....