Background

I have a very old EPSON R300 inkjet printer It has served me well for many years. I thought it was at least 10 if not 15 years old. I got it before I even became interested in Linux. For many of those years now I have been using this printer extensively on Linux.

It has been a really good printer and has been incredibly cheap to run. Many years ago I got a number of sets of ink for it. I think they only cost me £15! A colleague at work later on gave me more sets of ink. I ended up with a large bag full of ink cartridges which I have been working my way through ever since.

I used the printer infrequently for many years. This is far from ideal for an ink jet printer as doing so tends to cause the ink jet nozzles to clog up. Unsurprisingly in later years it has become somewhat temperamental. The problems consisted of paper mis-feeds (Probably down to the rubber take up rollers going hard over time) and missing bits of print (This I assume due to infrequent use of the printer and age of ink jet cartridges all of which were well out of their expiration date).

The mis-fed paper could be solved by individual feeding each sheet through the printer. The poor / missing print could be solved by a combination of running the print head clean routine or by replacing the offending cartridge.

Latterly I had print problems again and as per usual after cleaning the heads and then finally changing the cartridge the printer resumed printing normally.

Shortly after this I bought myself an Apple iMac mini and thought it could be useful to be able to print from it. I visited the EPSON website downloaded and installed the EPSON print driver for my trusty R300 printer.

I tried printing from my iMac and received a warning stating something like some of the components within your printer are worn and may need servicing. I’d never seen a message like this before as I normally print using open source print drivers on Linux which never report such things.

When I tried printing on my Apple Mac no black text was visible on the page. I tried running the head cleaning routine and this made no difference. I eventually had to resort to changing the colour of the text within the LibreOffice document. This allowed me to print text that was at least legible.

At the time I was a little suspicious of all this as the printer had been working so well just a few days previous. I plugged my trusty printer back into my trusty PC running an old version of Ubuntu using the open source printer drivers. Fired up LibreOffice and tried to print a document. To my surprise the printout was very good. While it was not as good as when the printer was new the quality of the black and coloured text was actually very good.

My suspicion though I can’t prove it is that the EPSON print driver has worked out that the printer is 10 plus years old and needs to be returned to EPSON for servicing (or to purchase a new printer). To ensure this the driver is crippling the output from the printer.

The Open Source print drivers have none of the nefarious nonsense and allows the printer to operate. As I said I cannot prove any of this however I’ll leave this up to you decide what you think is going on here.

At this point I was going to end the podcast however the story didn’t end there.

The story continues

My mother wanted me to print out some holiday insurance documents for her. She sent me a copy of her documents as I told her my printer was working again. The first page printed out slightly faintly but was readable the other pages seemed to print using invisible ink. I tried cleaning the heads but it made no difference. It’s looking a bit like my printer or at least the cartridge is past its expiry date.

Clearing out our loft I found the original box for my EPSON R300 printer and discovered that it was purchased in May 2005. This means the printer is now over 20 years old! At this point I decided that it was maybe about time that I replaced our ageing printer.

We use the printer very infrequently and rarely need colour. For this reason I decided this time to buy a laser printer since I believe these don’t tend to dry out like ink jet printers and are less likely to suffer with infrequent use. Only time will tell though I don’t expect this one to last 20 years!

Finally after all this I am not sure if using the EPSON driver had anything to do with the final demise of my printer though who knows. As Klaatu would say I leave that up to you dear listener to decide.