| Dye-based ink and paper | If you get the following message: "Requires Service. Parts inside your printer are near the end of their service life. See your printer documentation." |
| I have tried many approaches to reduce the price of printing. Continuous Ink Supplies (CIS) is tempting but remains very expensive and a lot of problems arise when the ink level varies with air getting into the system and resulting in a huge waste of ink to prime and purge the CIS system. I have tried the following method and so far it works beautifully. The ink is dye-based (Coralgraph but is very high quality and the quality of the prints is not different than when using the original EPSON cartridges) for less than a tenth of the price (and that's comparing one cartridge to one 100 ml ink bottle). 1. Buy 8 empty re-loadable cartridges for the EPSON R1800 (Coralgraph). 2. Buy dye-based insets (8) for Epson R1800 - about £ 15 for 8X 100ml bottles (Coralgraph). 3. Load the empty cartridges on the R1800 printer as you would do with original ESPON cartridges. 4. Fill with ink without removing the cartridges: a. Press the "ink" button on the printer. b. Open the cartridge trap. c. Without moving the cartridges, remove the rubber cap. d. Inject the ink using a 2.5 ml or 5 ml syringe with large gauge needdle. e. Seal well by putting the rubber lid in place. f. Repeat this for the 8 inks. 5. Print as normal. Ignore "Low ink" messages from the drivers asking you to replace cartridges. 6. After every long printing sessions (approx 20 A3+ colors prints) top-up the cartridges exactely as in 4. Photopaperdirect sells relatively cheap paper that works brilliantly with the above inkset. It is also the cheapest A3+ paper that I ever come accross. I am using the InkjetPhotoGloss Premium 270g that cost less than 60p per A3+ sheet (at least with the current discount - march 2009). Again, I have no affiliation to this company but they were very useful - they sent me a free test sample to try out. |
This message means that the printer thinks the waste ink pads are full and so it refuses to print until the pads are replaced and the waste ink (protection) counter is reset. In practice the pads will not be full if this is the first time you have received the message so all that needs to be done is to reset the counter. Next time you must replace or clean the pads. Go to here and download the utility. Install it, run it and exit it from the main window, now go to the icon in the system tray and right click on it. Select waste ink or protection counter and select reset. If this gives trouble then uninstall the Epson status monitor and try again (you can install the status monitor again afterwards). The irony is that the more you use an Epson printer the more reliable it will be (due to the heads being kept in good condition) but the people that use their printer most will get this message earlier than others. Some people never see this message. However, at some point you will need to divert the waste ink pipes toward a waste tank otherwise you will end up with a pool of waste ink under the printer. To do this please watch this video tutorial here This is an example of the waste ink pipes diverted on a Epson R1800: 
 You will have a good feel for the huge amount of ink used when the printer is switched on or when a head-cleaning cycle is performed. |
