I have an Epson R300 and I am concerned about an incident my friend has just encountered with his R300. His one is 9 months old and in regular use. Last week it displayed a warning message requesting attention which quickly turned into a fault where printer did not work. As the printer is still under warranty he took it back to shop and they put him in touch with the approved repairer.

He has just had the printer returned working now and the fault was described to him as a 'usage counter' setting had triggered which requires servicing. As it was under warranty this was a no charge item but was stated as a £10 (approx $18) job to rectify for next time.

Has anyone heard of this before? If this is genuine it is a hidden cost on the sale of the hardware to generate maintenance jobs. If it is known about does anyone have the 'fix' to prevent taking to the repairer.

Thorntonman

I don't know from the Epson R300 per se, but some printers will have a configuration panel which can be programmed by the user. If for example the default configuration was to stop printing when an error is encountered there may be an option to allow it to 'print through' error messages. The usage counter thing you mentioned sounds like the sort of thing that indicates that rollers and pads should be replaced (ie. routine or preventative maintenance); something which could cause an alert to show up but which should be possible to print through if properly configured.