johnson4

Yea, it’s all “pre made” based on your printer. generally users with Cadlink use 720x1440 for the resolution.

Yea, all the 180 nozzle printers print about the same speed. The small variables are on the head pass speed. It should do 6 12” X 24” an hour. It’s about 2.4 inches a minute.

That's awesome. It's a really good printer, I think you'll like it. Did you have a spare on hand?

i just meant really strong cleaner. Cleaning solution or piezo flush is perfectly fine. The switching black damper usually fails on them as they age. I haven’t had one fail yet. Just the regular dampers. this is what the switching damper and regular dampers look like. You can also buy the whole assembly sometimes, but it’s much more expensive and unnecessary.

Did you happen to run or leave any strong cleaner in the printer? If not, that’s likely a leaky damper.

You need to also consider windows will install the printer automatically when you plug it in, I don’t know about Mac. In general I would just double check, If you haven’t. if it does a nozzle check Print just fine from the printer menu, then I would believe software. It took me several hours of upgrading, downgrading, uninstalling reinstalling to get past that issue when it happened to me.

Yea, I’m not entirely sure. Does it say paper jam when you do a nozzle check from the printer menu with regular paper?

Try reinstalling the chipless firmware. You can't disable the updates, It's one of those " guaranteed OEM inks/updates" printers, so it auto updates when on Wifi, or connected to an Epson utility via USB. Even your phone. My issue when this occured was epson pushing BS on the printer. Restarting the printer and reinstalling the chipless firmware helped me. Removed wifi from it, I used EKprint so I didn't even install the Epson driver, just the EK driver. Problem solved. I'm not sure if that will be your case, just how it happened for me.

Do you have the printer connected to WiFi or the epson utility installed?

Not a problem. I intend on being very specific in my testing and it will all come back to this post when I finish. i wish you luck!

if you do your best and chug forward, it’ll cost you some money for your success. If you sit around pondering over a few nickels, you’ll likely be stuck there. First hand costs money, but is well worth the accuracy of the knowledge you learn which propels you forward past the competition.

From my experience expensive Epson heads don’t fail, you break them from mistakes. Seriously. The low end xp600 heads, I’ve been running those for several months without issue. Time will tell. It’s said the i3200 needs replaced every 6 months or so, again, a pulled head for a lower end Epson machine. Each Chinese machine takes at least TWO of these $1,100 heads. They are only 4 channel heads. i have been using Epson printers for aftermarket “use” since 2016. I can’t tell you how much shit I have broken, how much time I have dedicated to learning what I know hands on. Every little thing I do, it’s never a “guess” or blindly following someone else’s opinion. Never has been or will be. I get it wrong, I learn hands on and correct myself. with that said, back in the day till now I have went through: 4 Epson 1430’s 2 Epson c88 10 p600’s 3 p400’s 8 p800’s 2 R2400 1 R1800 2 Chinese machines likely other things I have forgotten tons and tons of cartridges, parts, printheads, failed ideas, you get my point. We break stuff to learn, I do. Since 2016, using aftermarket printers SOLELY which is 6-7 years, they have produced over 2 million gross worth of retail priced product within that timeframe solely from Epson conversions. I don’t know how else to give you an idea how much I use them. No that’s not profit or bragging. It’s to help you understand I’m not just playing with them. EVERY SINGLE TIME a head has failed me, was because of some mistake I made. Mostly innocent, I had no idea how fragile or how each and every aspect can affect them, and varied by model/design. one single head strike can do nothing, or it can completely kill your head instantly. Using bad or low quality ink, using cartridges without filters, not cleaning and maintaining them as you should based on the printer model. Trying “ unconventional “ methods will weaken or kill the head, like manually cleaning them with a syringe. Anything over 5 PSI and even if it works now, it won’t for long. Bad sealing capping stations, partially clogged capping stations, dampers, I mean it’s endless. any one of these can destroy your printhead, and unless you really look into it and DIY put in the time and effort, you won’t really know for your situation what happened, so you’ll likely make that mistake again, not knowing what caused the failure. for me, I have never given up or “ not known” why a failure occurred. Every single time, it’s been because of something I did or didn’t do and has taken a huge chunk of my life the last 6-7 years. right now I have a p800 running on two years old, my main machine. Goes through 2 rolls of film a week minimum. Still going strong. i also had a 2 day old p800 printhead fail because of a head strike when the film fell off the holder. It was about 12 inches of head strike. Never worked again. it’s all on YOU how long they last. These Chinese printers use lower end heads, not that is bad, but they do. Epson is out to make money, like anyone. They are usually Epson pulls from low-mid tier discontinued printers. The p5000 for example uses the same printhead as Epson’s DTG F2000/F2100. Exactly the same. That machine is actually based on the P5000. That head is $1,300 or so from Epson direct. The p800 8 channel head is around $900 direct . Yet, I can buy a 4 channel head for $1,100 for the Chinese printer ( don’t forget they take 2-4 of them). at the end of the day it’s trying to compare apples to bananas. The Chinese machines offer ALOT over the lower printhead quality it uses. Epson’s offer much less, but do offer higher quality prints and better heads. It’s a 50/50 split based on if you want mass production easy or if you want the best quality you can Get with a bit of effort. the worst thing you can do is ask a total stranger for advice on what you should do. They likely have very little experience or time invested and simply just “ found out” what they relay to you, which puts you both in the same boat eventually. Time after time I see a simple fix turn into a total disaster because the go-to is to mess with the printhead. I’ve learned it’s the last thing I do, the printhead failure is always in my experience an “after effect” because something else failed or went wrong. like your wheel bearing on your car failing, keep driving it like that and you’ll need a new rotor, caliper and pads and bleeding out the overheated fluid from the slight sideways sag causing brake drag. in this scenario, the bad wheel bearing is your point of failure, yet everything else fails with it as an effect because you didn’t know, or care. It’s a chain, one broken link caused it all to fail.

No problem

The vent hole may work- I usually pulled the tube from the cart and did it with a small hose on a syringe I rinsed out daily.

The dampers are a few bucks a set. From China like .20 cents each. It’s recommended but not necessary. You MUST keep the ink level at or below the printhead. Otherwise the positive pressure will cause severe leaking. it’s a basic ciss tank, basic in-line dampers attached to refillable carts. If you have that, then your good. I built mine for about $30 a set. It sucks shaking the white ink daily, and pulling/purging the settled white ink. If you print daily then shaking should be fine. Your carts are going to be the same way. making a wims for this type of ciss almost never works out. The amount of pressure ( positive or negative) on a damper-less head just won’t work well and will cause serious issues. worst case make it daily routine to pull 10ML per line each morning after shaking the white ink. More reliable and cheaper. Takes about 3 minutes if your slow and careful.

I had to. You need positive pressure on the in line dampers. The dampers should be able to withstand the pressure, the head likely isn’t making a great seal and/or suction to activate the dampers and pull the ink on top of that, it’s like double duty. Without the inline dampers, the top Of the ink in the tank should be the same height as the top of the printhead- not the tank itself. Any higher and the positive pressure causes leaking. All of my printers with in line dampers I have the ciss about 6” higher than the printhead. If it leaks, then the dampers are no good, anything less than 2”- 3” higher doesn’t work well for me either. Could try it anyway, raise it up, do 2 head cleans then test print. If it works it works, did for me. If it doesn’t, just lower it back down. im talking about the ink level in the tank, not necessarily the tank itself. A good test to be safe would just to sit the ciss on top of the printer IF it has dampers. If it doesn’t have dampers in the ink lines then don’t do anything I just said.

Is the ciss higher than the printhead?

Here I will just post random information about the P5000, may or may not be useful. With time I will post timings for The P5000 print speeds, how well it works and overall tips and tricks for it's use. Two things I DO NOT like about this printer- It has an ink system similar to the P600, Meaning it uses a diaphragm pump for the ink. This was a point of failure on the P600's. I was hoping/expecting an actual pressurized ink system like on the P800. It has an actual air pump that pressurizes the ink cartridges with air. This prevents color drop outs, clogs, and many other perks compared to a gravity fed/diaphragm pump system. On my p600's, this was ALWAYS a point of failure on 8+ machines I ran for years. While it was avoidable with 2-3 month cleaning schedule to flush the manifold, it took alot of time to complete and was a pain. To reiterate, the ink pump in the p600 uses diaphram type pumps for each channel that is in contact with the ink, rather than air pushing the ink to the head. These springs and rubber valves and tiny holes eventually get " sludged" and stop working correctly from the white ink pigment. Hopefully there is a better designed system with in the P5000. The p5000 has a built in self-feeding roll holder that fits the DTF rolls perfectly. It has a vacuum table to prevent head strikes. The 200 ML carts are resettable with a chip resitter. It's not to me, because it will actually tell me how much ink is remaining instead of guessing or running out like with chipless firmware. for smaller cartridges or CISS systems this is very annoying, but here it plays nicely into the whole idea. The cartridges themselves are $3.50 each, or $35 per set of 10. The chips are $32 a set, so $67 plus shipping from overseas. if you buy a few sets and some replacement parts it makes them less than $85 a set with chips. Resetters were about $35 each, one for the waste one for the chips. for about $250 you can have yourself two full sets of chipped carts and two resetters- all you need to get started. After that, Cadlink does 14 12" X 12" prints with this machine per hour. It's not bad at all for cadlink print speeds. I have yet to test anything else but I will have print time and quality comparisons like I have done in the past with cadlink, acro 10.5, ekprint. I like that is it big and open, it's easy to work on, I feel like Epson will discontinue this model within the next 12 months though, so I'm trying to get my testing out of the way post-haste. I have high hopes for this machine, I have been asking all of the " top" people around about this printer for about a year. I'm glad they ignored me when what I said upset them ( simply asking for facts from them). Now I have it first hand because of this. I have a feeling this will shock some people, However I have expected it from this machine for over a year. It's not a pissing contest for me. For me, It is the thrill of learning about a new printer and learning any new tricks I can find to better the cause and bringing actual backed-up information to the table. I have a reason for everything I do, and can prove it. I'm not here to make friends, likes, or sell you something. I'm here because this forum brought my idea's and hopes to life years ago. I like helping people with a real effort involved, not blatantly giving out answers without any reason other than an opinion. If I don't have time to explain why or what testing led to my conclusion, I don't say it because this is how misinformation spreads. So anything posted within this thread is from hands on use, and in some cases I may be wrong. While I do test multiple times and look for a repeatable pattern, Please question me if you like It helps me verify further with more evidence my beliefs from an educated/tested standpoint. I'm not here to make a " win" for myself. I am here to just as a whole, or community, build up the knowledge on things so the people who are involved working from different angles can all reap the rewards as a whole. That's the idea anyway.

How many washes without any special care does HTV last?

Correct. wide format covers wide and small format. I will message you something.

For any of the Chinese controllers you do need the wide format version, including the 13" and smaller chinese controller printers. I have both, the wide format version and the small format version. You can upgrade the small format version for the price difference if you wanted, as well you can add an additional port for slightly less than the small format license cost so you can run multiple machines at the same time under a different queue.

Should be able to use any supported Epson, just one at a time unless you pay for each additional port. They support the P800, so they should support it.

The dual is pretty nice. Depending on your RIP it’s a bit faster. The main thing is it just works till the job is done. i finally Got Cadlink working correctly, it’s a breeze in comparison overall.

So, Using it again and got it printing fine. same print ( duplicate), on the third one, boom. White under base is all wrong again. Restarted the printer, no change. Restarted cadlink instead of messing with the settings, Started printing like normal again. Since I wasn't aware of this happening, It could have been an issue with some images printing fine and others not, because I didn't go back and reprint the one's that printed fine when it started printing them incorrectly. I will keep checking. So.... There's that. Now I know.

Thanks. I haven't really had time to mess with it anymore. I was talking to someone about it and it seems to be an issue with something I am doing. I'm used to Acro and EK, which I have never had this happen with. If it's on me I don't feel like wasting someone else's time over it.