epson stylus sx515w ciss bis

After discovering the printer not printing again the cause was investigated to find - no black ink again. We had only just installed a black ink cartridge at a cost of 9.99 from a leading catalogue shopping store. In fact I am sure everyone always says its only just had a new in cartridge when in fact the reality is such that if the purchase date was checked on the receipt it was actually purchased over 4 months ago and has printed several hundred sheets of A4.

Anyway it seemed like it was only five minutes ago and the prospect of spending another tenner was not appealing. The first thing I am sure most people do is stop printing. Thats fine but sooner or later you will need to print someting and you either need a new cartridge or a new printer!

We decided to investigate a ciss for this printer. A leading auction website had them available from a handful of sellers. We chose one at 24.99 as it mentioned that it had self resetting chips. In fact they all could have done but only this seller chose to mention it. The postage was 4.99 so total investment was 29.98.

It arrived quite slowly considering we paid a fiver for postage, around 5 days I remember. So if you need to print something urgently then you will need to pop to the local shops and get a cartridge.

We unpackaged the item to find the instructions were very poor. There was an enclosed installation cd rom except our model of printer did not appear in any of the pdf document names on the cd. No doubt it was there but the pdfs only gave the base model. We could either find the base model which I seem to remember was in a pdf titled B40 ( I may be wrong ) or run a search in youtube for a video.

We chose the youtube option and searched for sx515w ciss and found a great installation video. The only thing that was not clear was the removal of the cartridge cover. Another video had the simply twist with a screwdriver and the cover will pop out. This in reality became twist the screwdriver and the plastic hinge snaps on one side firing it into the printer mechanism resulting in the expression - oh dear me and a recovery effort lasting 10 minutes.

First hurdle over, the cartridge cover removed from the sx515w so we followed the installation video and all went to plan. Adjusting the silicon tubes seemed strange not too much not too little but hey you can only do your best. Complete the ciss bulk ink system installation and press the ok button.

The first thing to note is the printer pauses then accelerates the heads along the carriage. Ensure that everything is in place before you press the ok button. After a few moments all is good and we are ready to print.

Our first print job was only file 13 fodder. I suspect that in leaving the printer unloved for such a long period of time some ink had dried blocking the heads/nozzles on the epson sx515w.

I must admit to achieve a decent print quality we had to process the head clean / nozzle check operation several times. So much so infact the printer reported the cartridges needed replacing and required use of the reset button on the epson ciss. I dont think this was any fault of the ciss, I think it was just that the printer had been left inoperative for too long.

However imagine how cheesed you would be having fitted a new retail cartridge to end up still not managing to print from it.

The printer happily prints with good quality. Photos are very slighty colour mismatched imho but maybe this could be cured if some time was spent messing with colour profiles. It would be fine to print some family photos off for granny's festive gift or indeed to stick a few in some photo frames. Letters, report and such like - no problems at all with good colour reproduction.

Be aware that the cover that closes over the carriage and is subsequently the scanner base is raised slightly due to the ink tubes coming out to the ink tanks. Now and again we have seen a message on the sx515w display - close scanner unit in fact this it always shown upon attempting a head alignment operation. To bypass this and get things working again you have to press down the scanner unit on the left side enough to that the epson printer recognises it as closed and carries on printing again. I suppose that I could spend an hour or two takling the plastic with my imitation dremel but I dont need to do an aligment check now that its all flushed and running so its not really an inconvenience.

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