Printer flashes lights when ask to print

I thought the other day that a lot of people may be interested in having access to the vast pool of knowledge that myself and my staff dispense on a daily basis to my customers. As a nationwide supplier of printing consumables we often get asked by customers about related problems they are having with there printers, and obviously we gladly help out anyone we can as opposed to customers having to call expensive manufacturers help lines at premium rate call tariffs.

A favourite question we get asked is "I have just gone to print something off on my Epson Inkjet printer and it will not print", I then ask the customer how they have done this and have they changed any printer settings or installed new software recently. The answer is usually no I have not changed any settings or installed any thing. Our next question is "What are the lights /buttons on the front of the printer doing?" The common answer is, "they are all flashing at once, even if I switch the printer off at the socket and switch it on again".

We now know what the problem is! There is I believe a method built into an Epson printer that counts the amount of printing you have done, a bit like a car speedo measures the mileage you have done, but unlike a car where when you hit a certain mileage a light or warning will come up at worst and tell you the car needs a service. The Epson printer just stops dead and all the lights flash, if you dig a little deeper into your instruction manual/disc it tells you to call the Epson help line, who then tell you the printer needs a service at your local Epson dealers. I duly took my faithful C82 epson printer to my local Epson service centre; very help full and who charged me and gave me back a printer that worked.

This intrigued me so I asked a couple of my computer tech customers if they could shed any light on the matter, and they both confirmed my suspicions. You plug in the correct software and reset the counter. It is nothing to do with your computer, your printer, your brand of inkjet cartridges or your computer. It is simply Epson's way of getting you to their service centre.

So if you come to print with your Epson inkjet printer and it will not, and then proceeds to flash all of its lights at you. You now know what to do, unlike quite a few of my customers including my self, who spent hours reinstalling software, trying new sets of cartridges, both genuine Epson cartridge and the more popular compatible ones. I hope this saves some one some grief and frustration.