Feb 27, 2009 04:16 AM
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A few months back, I reviewed Epson's Artisan 800 printer, and I loved it. Tonight, I hate its shiny plastic guts. In fact, I may never touch another Epson product again because of this...
I have a crucial fax I need to send early tomorrow morning. Crucial. I need to print 15 pages of black-and-white legal contract, sign every single page, and then fax the shit. All of this is within the capabilities of the Artisan 800. But tonight, the thing printed 9 pages, then told me it had run out of Magenta. Yes, as in, a color I don't need at all to print 15 black-and-white pages.
OK, so I have a spare Magenta cartridge—whoo hoo! I pop it in there, and all is well, until page 11, when it says it needs me to replace... Light Cyan.
I have Light Cyan, too, so I put it in, and it says I need to replace Cyan. Well, there's already a new Cyan in there, so I pop it out because maybe it's just in there wrong. Turns out, someone in my household put it in without removing the safety sticker, and the printer waited like three weeks to tell me this. So I pull off the safety sticker, place it back in the printer, but no go. Artisan says it can't recognize Cyan. Nor can it recognize Light Cyan. Or Yellow.
Yellow? I hadn't even touched Yellow. Suddenly, it can't recognize half my ink cartridges, all of which happen to be completely full. I pop them out, put them back in again. Nothing.
I restart the printer twice, yanking plug and all. Same error.
I pull out all the ink cartridges, put them back in, restart the thing, and get the same beeping error for the same three miscreants.
Have you ever seen your wit's end? Cuz mine is hanging out all over the place at this point. I go to Epson.com to troubleshoot, and I get the following frightening message:
What they're not telling you is that pretty much any expensive-ass ink cartridge you remove for any reason may be rejected by the thing at any time forever more, so don't even think about popping the shit out once you've put it in there, most especially if the machine is categorically refusing to recognize it in the first place.
So I can't print another page, even though every indicator shows I'm full up to the damn gills on black ink. At the end of the troubleshooter, after I click "No, this did not solve my problem" three or four times, I read this obnoxious statement:
I'm not sure if you can see my middle finger from where you're sitting, Epson, but rest assured, it is extended and pointing in your direction.
Tomorrow, when I go to print and fax my documents at Kinko's, I'll be thinking of you, and I will be seething. But when I go to get a new printer, I'll be thinking of HP or Canon. Probably Canon.
Send an email to Wilson Rothman, the author of this post, at wilson@gizmodo.com.
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