No real progress is being made with this printer. I received the new “maintenance box”, AKA waste ink tank and installed it Monday. This cleared the error on the machine and allowed me to resume head cleaning and testing. I got into the Service Program and forced the printer to perform an ink charge, which takes a very long time to run. I ran more nozzle checks and was showing a little improvement. I ran ten purge pages for each color. These are just single pages of JPG images with only one color on them – the exact color of each printer channel. Three color channels, orange, yellow and green will print the purge page properly. All the other colors only print a very faint image or no image at all.

I decided to run another ink charge to see if this would help. However, I got an error stating that the maintenance box was full again and the machine would not run the charge. The maintenance box is not full – I weighed it and it is the same as when it was empty, nine ounces. Some counter in the printer has decided that I need to purchase a new one. I don’t think there is actually any sensor in the tank itself that can determine whether it is full or not. The Epson 4900 Service Program, that was provided with the printer, will allow you to reset a dozen or so function counters. Alas, the maintenance box counter is not one of them.

I’ll have to obtain a waste tank resetting tool so that I can reset and reuse these tanks. I had assumed that a new tank would last a year or two, but apparently not. So, I’m waiting on parts again and spending money on items I did not think I would need to purchase. And, I still don’t know if this printer is going to be able to print with enough working channels to do the work I intend for it. Not good.