Intermittant rewards are frustrating
February 23, 2011 6:01 AM   Subscribe

Do you have the Epson NX420 printer/scanner? Does it work?

We just bought an Epson NX420 printer/scanner. It seems temperamental to say the least. The wireless printing works sometimes and sometimes not; same with the USB connection. The scanner works sometimes and sometimes not. We have both a PC and a Mac; they're equally likely to get the silent treatment. Yesterday morning I tried to print one page; it wouldn't; I gave up, and then at dinnertime I heard it gen up and start to print. We have no idea if we are doing something wrong (unlikely, we followed the instructions and we do nothing differently when it works than when it doesn't) or if the printer is just fussy. Any ideas what we can do, besides return it? We also had problems with our old printer/scanner, but that one was several years old and previously had worked fine, so we chalked it up to age.
posted by Ollie to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)
 
I have a NX515. I love it, but it's a major PITA. I have the same problems as you. The problem is that it doesn't wake up form sleep mode properly. Now, I power cycle it before printing, and it works like a (annoying) charm.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 6:13 AM on February 23, 2011


I have an NX510 and most of the time it works fine but then there are the times when none of my computers claims it can't find it, or when I want it to print but it ignores me and the panel says it's waiting for me to push the "copy" button because it somehow got it into it's head that what I really wanted was to use it as a copy machine. If I reboot it (and/or the computer) a few times, it eventually behaves. I've learned to live with this. As the parent of a teenager, it feels kind of normal to me.
posted by Obscure Reference at 6:18 AM on February 23, 2011


I have the 420 and at the risk of jinxing it I have never had a problem with it; it worked right out of the box. It is, however, plugged into the dodgiest outlet of all time, so it may be that constant hard power cycling is the key to our happiness.
posted by range at 6:33 AM on February 23, 2011


We had the NX125 and abandoned it after three months (and about 300 failed attempts to print anything). We had many of the same problems you had - sometimes it would just refuse to do anything, sometimes it would send paper through but print blank or only half of the lines. One of the things that Epson told us was that you have to wait for the ink to get "charged up" when you plug the printer in and turn it on. So if you don't print very often, you need to prepare in advance by several minutes.

We got so fed up with the printer that we bought a new one (Canon PIXMA, outstanding so far) and just junked the Epson.
posted by AgentRocket at 7:04 AM on February 23, 2011


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