The Epson TX700W has died

posted on 11:05 AM on Monday 07 January 2013

The Epson TX700W is dead with a message about the ink pads being full and needing replacement. So after some googling, apparently there is a counter for this which is based on the number of pages printed. Rather upset with Epson, so they know that the ink pads will get filled up and instead of engineering something to solve this problem, they decided to just kill the printer when they think it is full (remember the counter). In the US, they make available a re-setter software for this but not for the rest of the world (maybe we do need to be a bit more trigger happy with lawsuits). Getting this back to Epson would certainly be costly. Getting a resetting software is possible but will either be difficult to find or it will cost me.

Went to Sim Lim and asked around and 2 shops have indicated that they can perform the reset with one of them doing an additional cleaning of the ink pads which is probably a good idea. God knows how much ink has been deposited on the thing. Pretty cheap too, $25 for the reset and cleaning. Will bring down the printer one of these days to try. It is such a good printer so it would be a shame to let it go to waste.

Since Pauline needs to print, I got a Brother DCP-J725DW as a replacement for now while I get the TX700W fixed. So far so good, the photo printouts are nice looking but certainly not as sharp as the Epson. Airprint is quite cool but of limited use since no settings can be done. Ink is also rather cheap and boy does the thing print fast. The Epson has good printout but it is slow, so it is nice to have something that prints fast. I am rather impatient :-)