Epson C80 Garbling Text

Grrr, why do printers always **** out when they know you are in a hurry? I need to print out 30 copies of a six page report for a meeting in 15 hours time.

The Epson C80 is for some reason garbling text in that it's printing several lines of text on top of each other, then proceeding as normal for a few paragraphs, then doing it again. This is happening on every page.

Graphics are fine, so my work around is to print to PDF then open each page in Photoshop, but it's really not ideal.

Word, Acrobat and Quickbooks all experience this problem.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any suggestions on how to fix it? It's Sunday night here so there's no chance of a helpdesk looking at this until after my deadline.

I've checked the Epson site and gone through their troubleshooting wizard and there was no solution suggested there. Have also run the nozzle clean utility.

Thanks in advance for any guidance,
Jo

 

Hi Jo,

Printing on top of the same line sounds like something is stuck/jammed in the drive wheels. Get a torch/flashlight, open the printer as much as possible and check the mechanisms. Push the wheels around, if you can, to look for pieces of paper or build-up of ink (clean off ink build-up with an alcohol based cleaner).

Failing that, I would remove the drivers as completely as possible (Add/remove Programs and in the Printers folder), then reinstall them.

Matt

 

Hi Matt, thanks for replying. The American Epson helpdesk said this sounded like a stuffed print head, while the Auckland based helpdesk say it's an alignment issue. Since I ran an re-alignment utility it seems to be okay for graphics.

I'm fairly sure there's nothing stuck in the mechanism although I agree it sounds like that. There's a sort of shuffling, grinding sound every now and then as though the cogs are skipping. I'll give things a clean inside.

Cheers,
Jo