A swing and a miss...

This is a follow up to my previous post on our new Epson printer.

My biggest (only?) complaint about our previous HP All-in-One was that when the ink was out, it ceased to function as a scanner or fax machine. Since a few years have passed and All-in-One printer/fax/copy/scanner machines like this have been around a while, I thought to myself, "Self, SURELY they have evolved to overcome such silly obstacles."

Self...

I hate to tell you this... but you were WRONG.

We've owned this new Epson WorkForce 600 printer for 3 months and have NOT done a lot of fancy color printing on it. Nevertheless, the yellow ink cartridge just ran out.

ALLLLLL STOOOOOOOP!!!!!

[cue sound effect of Engine Order Telegraph - RING! RING!]
"Maneuvering, Conn, Stop the Shaft."

Do NOT pass GO, do NOT collect $200, go directly to jail! printer-hell. The lack of YELLOW ink prevented doing ANYTHING else.

Wanna print something in black and white like your Blockbuster free rental coupons that expire today?

Too bad.

Wanna scan a check that you need deposited to your bank account pronto?

Tough.

Wanna fax an important counter-offer to your realtor 6,000 miles away?

Better call the wah-mbulance.

That empty yellow ink cartridge brings the printer to its knees.

I was pretty disappointed, but sadly not all that surprised. As long as Epson is making and selling the ink cartridges, it makes sense business-wise for an empty ink cartridge to be just as crippling as removing the electricity. It forces you to buy more ink from them instead of just living without that color.

But it's a sleazy business practice if you ask me.

Even so, I decided to write to Epson to express my disappointment. In my email, I offered two suggestions to improve their product. First, a short term mitigation would be to put a slip of paper in the printer boxes or user manuals that warns customers that the device will cease to function if you run out of any individual ink cartridge. Recommend to the customers that they should always have a spare of EVERY ink cartridge (black, cyan, magenta, and yellow) so that they won't have any important scanning or faxing held up by the lack of an ink cartridge. Second, as a long-term fix, I recommended updating the firmware in the printers so that it would allow scanning or faxing to override the "out of ink" error.

Much to my surprise, an Epson customer service representative called me last night.

Why did she call?

That's an excellent question. Let's see if you can guess. The Epson rep called me to...

A) thank me for being a supporter of Epson and writing nice things about them in at least two past blog posts.
B) apologize for the inconvenience that was caused by their poor systems engineering.
C) thank me for my recommendations to make their product better.
D) offer to send me a free yellow ink cartridge to show their appreciation for my loyalty and continued positive blogging.
E) all of the above.

Go ahead, talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a moment to consider just how awesome was Epson's response to my complaint. Think you know the answer? Ready? Good. I'm sorry to say it was a trick question. I should have offered you an option F) None of the Above, because I have absolutely no friggin' CLUE why the lady called me. She didn't thank me for my feedback, didn't apologize for the inconvenience, and didn't offer me anything short of a little didly and a lot of squat.

Not like I really would have expected her to offer me anything, mind you. The only thing I wish she would have said is that I am absolutely RIGHT (that you should be able to scan or fax even if you're out of ink or print black-and-white when you're out of color ink) and offer me some assurance that they would upgrade the firmware.

Nope. None of that. She very matter-of-factly stated that they will not be making any changes to the printer firmware and she just wanted to let me know.

Um... Gee... Thanks... I guess. Why bother calling and wasting my time?

I suppose I give Epson some credit for making an appearance that they care and acknowledge that they actually READ my email. The phone call response was about as effective as the infamous, "duly noted," response in the Navy. They could have given me THAT lip service via an automated return email and save money on the salary of the phone representative.

New Printer

Can you believe how much computer printers have advanced over the years?

It blows my mind thinking back to 1993. My wonderful and generous grandpa had bought me a new super-whamodyne 486 computer (oooooooooh, aaaaaaaaah). That fall, I passed my interview with Admiral DeMars (a.k.a. Director of Naval Reactors) and was accepted in the Nuclear Propulsion training program. When you pass your interview with Naval Reactors, you get an accession bonus. I went out and spent $2,000 of my accession bonus on an Epson ActionLaser 1500 laser printer to go with my top-o-the-line 486.

That was one of the best purchases I've ever made. I certainly got my money's worth. I still have that Epson printer and it still works like a champ. It has become harder and harder to find ink refills for it over the years, but Epson earned a great reputation with me by virtue of the 16 year old printer that's still my old-reliable printer.

A few years ago, we picked up an HP All-in-One printer that was a COLOR printer, fax machine, and scanner. It was a nice capability to have, but it had its limitations. I have my Epson connected to a print server so that any of the computers in our home network can print on the Epson. I could do that with the HP, but it would not work as a fax or scanner over the LAN. In order to use those non-printer functions, I had to actually plug the printer's USB cable into a computer.

With the advent of wonderful new capabilities like depositing checks at home using a scanner, each time we get a bunch of checks for the boys' birthdays or Christmas, I would gather up all the checks, set up a chair by the HP printer, plug my computer into the HP and sit there scanning checks to deposit.

Likewise, anytime I have scanned a piece of the boys' artwork, I carry my laptop over to the HP and plug it in so I can scan the picture.

To tell the honest truth, we didn't use the HP very often unless we really needed something printed in color. I used it more for the scanner function. Segue into a big frustration of mine with the HP: When one of the ink cartridges runs out and it displays the error message telling you to load ink, it ceases to function as a scanner or fax machine. Of course, this happened at the most inopportune moment when I really needed to scan something like an important realty document to email back to our realtor, but the HP wouldn't let me scan it because it was out of ink.

Fast forward to present day Ashburn, Virginia.

The catalyst that drove us to search for a new printer was that my wife's new computer with Vista would not recognize the old print server and old Epson printer connected to it, so she couldn't print anything.

I had heard there were printers available now that would connect wirelessly to your LAN. I hadn't really looked into it because our setup was functional and my old reliable Epson was still chugging away in the basement.

Then one day, my wife and I were in the Buy More**, and we saw the price tags on the printers. Oh my! They had some really nice looking wireless printers for about $200! The printer the salesman at the store had recommended was an Epson WorkForce 600. It's a color printer, scanner, fax machine, has a memory card reader for printing out pictures, and it's wireless!


Not one to make big purchases like that without doing some research first, I came home and checked user reviews and prices on epinions and pricegrabber. I saw positive user reviews on the web and comparable prices to what they were offering at the store, so a couple of weeks later I went back to pick one up.

When I went into the store the next time, the printer was marked down on clearance AND they gave me the military discount, so I ended up walking out of the store with my new printer for $120!!! Cha-ching! Cha-ching!

So far, I LOVE the new Epson. It was very easy to setup on each of our computers to link wirelessly and print. It's awesome to sit here in the comfort of my chair in the family room and scan and work with an image of something I just tossed in the scanner as I walked by. No more lugging my laptop over and holding it there while I plug it in to let the scanner run. My only complaint so far is that it's pretty loud when it prints. It remains to be seen if it will continue to function as a scanner if the ink runs out. We shall see. So far though, I like it.

** Speaking of the Buy More - can you believe we have to wait until MARCH for the new season of Chuck to start??? That's just cruel making us wait that long.