My Epson XP-520 printer started having issues. It seemed to be using more ink to clean the heads than was used in actual printing. Also, it was printing black ink in places where it should have been using one of the color inks. Even when running the Head Nozzle Check program, it would print some of the yellow as black. In addition, it was getting harder and harder to find the ink for it (273 or 273XL ink).

I started to look around at printers in the stores and online and decided to try out one of the EcoTank printers that use bottles of ink instead of cartridges. The ink in these printers are also supposed to last much longer. I eventually decided to on the Epson EcoTank ET-2800 printer/scanner as it seemed reasonably priced at $189.99 and was at a local Office Depot. Here’s what it looks like on my desk:

So far it has been printing and scanning well. Being an ink-jet printer, I do realize that I’ll probably have to clean the Print Head Nozzles from time to time. Hopefully, it’ll behave better for longer. The only thing it’s missing that the XP-520 printer had is a SD card reader. So, I’ll probably need to get a separate USB to SD card reader since my PC does not have one built-in. I am fine with that though.

I have updated my Hardware page to reflect the addition. 🙂

Well, over the past couple weeks, my Epson Workforce 645 printer failed to operate normally after replacing the black ink cartridge. The printer would keep displaying a generic “printer error” and all I could do was turn it off and on to retry which never worked. I had received this error before but this was the first time it never came back alive.  I even unplugged it for awhile with no positive results.  So, I went to the Epson support site and found the nearest authorized service center at AAMComp Computer Technologies in Oklahoma City. After a few days it was determined to be a bad printhead that would cost $185 to fix as the printer was 4.5 years old and out of warranty. Yeah.. uhm, no.

As it happens, they had an Epson XP-520 Printer that some other customer had given them that was still under the original warranty and in working order.  I decided to buy it for the reduced price of $74 (total). Here’s what it looks like:

It seems to work well and the color print-outs actually look a little better than the Workforce printer did in standard/normal mode.  Scanning also works well.  I did lose the fax capability that the Workforce had but I never used it and had actually disabled the Windows services that controlled it a long time ago. Hopefully this one will last awhile.

I have updated my hardware page to reflect the addition. 🙂