Epson Stylus Photo 2200

by Sam
(New Brunswick, New Jersey)

Epson Stylus Photo 2200

One of the printers highly regarded by professional fine arts and commercial photographers is the high priced classic Epson Stylus Photo 2200. This Epson printer utilizes the piezo printer heads instead of the thermal print heads used by HP and Canon. However, since the makers are aware that it is prone to clogging if not used frequently, Epson provided the nozzle check as well self-cleaning functions integrated in its drivers.

This is to ensure that the print heads are well maintained without having to resort to the more drastic actions as suggested above. The printer is quite high priced enough and getting such a fine set of inkjet printer heads rendered unusable would be quite a big disappointment. Besides, replacing a piezo printer head can be rather expensive.

In case you're interested in print heads that are attached to the ink cartridges, you can settle on the HP and Canon printer models instead.
Making a routine check-up of you printer heads especially if they are inkjet printer heads ensures the clarity and vividness of your printer outputs.

How to Clean Inkjet Printer Heads

Getting your inkjet printer heads clogged is common especially for inkjet printer heads. It would be a good idea to check your printer heads periodically if there are any signs of clogging. Otherwise, leaving them clogged to build up more clogs will only render your printer heads useless and will of course eventually need a replacement. This can only hamper your workload and could have been avoided if you kept a routine check up of your printers.

Clogging usually occurs if there are long lulls in using the printer. After every printing session, the tiny holes in the inkjet printer head retain some of the ink recently used and will dry up in the process. The dried up ink will cake of course. If it will take long before you find use for your inkjet printer again, the dried up ink would have already hardened together with the tiny particles of dust that accumulated during the long idle periods. Hence, it would be best if you made it a habit to check your printer heads first, to find out if they need cleaning before using them again. Most often, they do.

This is one of the reasons why the latest models of printers have built-in cleaning systems for the printer heads. If your printer has this technology, what you should do is to run some test prints to automatically trigger the printer into its self-cleaning mode. If this doesn't work, it maybe your printer's cleaning process is operated with the use of a software. Check this out from the tech support of your printer brand.

There are also printers that come along with ink cartridges whose print heads are attached to this. It is possible that the long idle period had also dried up the ink in the cartridges. The easiest way of course is to simply replace the entire cartridge since you can no longer use the ink anyway. However, if you will do this every time you print, it's a great waste of money since we all know how expensive computer inks are. The best way is to check your printer head periodically, and do some test runs. Don't go overboard in running too many tests since this is again a waste of energy and printer inks.

To clean your inkjet printer head, remove the heads from your printer (if you're not too confident with how to go about it, check the printer manuals).

Soak the printer heads with distilled water mixed with a little ammonia or rubbing alcohol. There are special solutions for soaking up inkjet printer heads but they can be very expensive. Soak the head for 10 minutes or more which depends on how tough the clogs are; some even find it necessary to soak them overnight. See if the clogs have detached themselves from the printer head, enough to render the ink passages clear and free from clogs.

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