Back in 2004 I purchased a new Epson 2200 Printer. I printed two (2) prints on in and then boxed it up with the ink cartridges installed and never used it again. Then, last week, I thought that adding the inkjet printing process as a photographic syntax - which it certainly is - I dug the printer out of storage to see if it would still print after being in storage for 7 years. Everything was in its proper place except for the power cable which I couldn't find for the past two days. I even stopped by Fry's this morning to buy one but they didn't have one that matched. Then this afternoon, shortly before the nightly news, I found it right where I thought it was but never saw it even though I had searched thru that drawer several times since yesterday.
I plugged it in and it powered up! I then installed the printer software and ran the nozzel check. Surely they were clogged after all these years and the ink remaining in the cartridges probably solidified. A red light indicated that the light cyan needed to be replaced and the printout indicated that the nozzles needed cleaning and two patterns (yellow and light cyan) were absent entirely. A "new" light cyan was in the box so I changed that cartridge and ran the cleaning cycle 20 or 30 times. Gradually the broken lines became continuous and finally the yellow pattern appeared - faint but its lines were continuous.
But will it print? The Epson manual says that not powering up the printer for more than a month is bad news and in this case it's been 7 years since it was last powered up and the ink all dates from 2004 (the production date on the ink is all 4/2004 except for the cyan that I changed which is 7/2004). So I arbitrarily picked an image from my scan files and the image below, which is a faithful representation of what appears on my moniotor, appears just as Drew Brees was surpassing Dan Marino's NFL record:
After all these years the printer works!! And I didn't even have to buy that power cord!
Thomas
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