Another question

["MCNAMARA,PATRICK" <MCNAMAP@apci.com>]

Well, I got such a great response to my dpi question (thanks everyone!) that
I'll try another.

I had a Stylus Color II that I passed down to my sister when I picked up the
EX. The Color II, though, was/is a problem lately. The problems started when
I used some cheap 3rd party cartridges. I tried a couple different brands,
and several of them printed color terribly (one, for example, never printed
yellow), so I ended up removing them before they ran out (I know, I
shouldn't have done that). I went back to using Epson cartridges, but the
quality never quite got to where it originally was; blurred text, colors
occasionally dropping out, lines in the output, etc. But it more or less
served it's purpose, so I never bothered to get it serviced.

Now, giving the printer to my sister, I decided to make a more serious
attempt to get the output to improve; I put some new cartridges in, ran it
through a bunch of cleaning cycles, ran the alignment utility, opened it and
cleaned a bunch of dust and cat hairs out of it (one of my cats had a habit
of sleeping on the printer).

That helped somewhat, but even after a bunch of cleaning cycles, the colors
start banding and dropping out again after a page or two of printing. Black
text isn't as crisp as it could be.

Is this printer a lost cause? Is there any further dismantling and cleaning
I could do, or is the only other option to have Epson service it... which,
given it's vintage, may not be worth it.

Thanks,
Patrick McNamara

-
Please turn off HTML mail features. Keep quoted material short. Use
accurate subject lines. http://www.leben.com/lists for instructions.