Epson 9800 black ink conversion problem

[Jinsonphoto]

Hi I'm new to this forum. This a fantastic resource & I'm hoping I can pull from the members experience.

I have been printing on medium sized (17inch) printers for a while now, but I just purchased a used Epson 9800. Anyways the 9800 is setup for matte. I went to switch over to photo, but when I started the process the printer is requiring me to switch out cartridges that are not even close to empty. I read in the manual that all cartridges need to be above 30%, but the cartridges that are requested to be changed are at least 30-50%. This seems crazy for changing for changing a black ink cartridge? Is this normal?

Btw I must mention the cartridges that are being requested for changing are not the conversion cartridges. I haven't even made it that far.

So if I do order these cartridges & replace the requested cartridges could I put the older cartridges in after the conversion?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I find it hard to believe that this could be normal.

Regards~
Tony

 

[William Allen]

We used to have a 7800, the smaller brother and it demanded that all cartridges be at least half-full whenever it did a power clean. When you do a black-change, all the ink lines are purged and this takes a fair bit of ink of all colours so the process is similar to a power-clean.

We spent roughly GBP 7k on ink for the 7800 and just over half went into the maintenance tank - we used to weigh them before disposal. We just used Photo-black for all our printing!

 

[IT Supplies]

The bad thing about the 7800 series is that it will purge the current black to the other black to use on the media that you want to use. The 7890/9890 has the fix for that. Since each color has a tube that goes from the cartridge to the print head, it uses about .5ml of ink to change from one black to the other black. Also, during the print head initializing at first, the printer comes with a starter set of ink (less than 150ml) and will use about 30% to fill the print head and tube. It will show a huge amount used on the LCD screen on the printer, but it still has a majority of the ink in the tube.

Epson has nice rebates going on this month for the 7890/9890. You can check our site out and see for yourself on the savings even with the inks.
info@itsupplies.com