U3364521@ucsvc.ucs.unimelb.edu.au (Lou Cavallo) (02/05/90)
G'day,
I'd like to canvas this newsgroups readers for experiences with Epson DFX-5000
dot matrix printers. The institute that employs me currently has one on trial.
It has worked well *but* we have had a persistent problem with paper jamming..
:-(. Fortunately the frequency of paper jams is low, too low in fact to allow
easy reproducibility of this type of fault {I've spent not a little time down
on my knees watching the paper feed path to try to track this down}.
Our problems:
1) if using the rear paper path it appeared that, without sufficient tension
on the paper being pulled past the printer head, the paper can easily fold out
away from the printer platten whereupon the print head can/will jam. A usual
work around is to let the expelled pages drop to the floor.
2) the front paper path was continuing on an anti-environmental trend of eating
pages within the middle of long print jobs until we tried setting the dipswitch
setting for "skip past perforation" option off. This causes the paper when near
the page perforation mark (assuming TOF is set) to be fed quickly past to the
TOF for the next page. We were getting some pages jamming at the perforation
point... { C= :-) smiley with light bulb above head }. Currently we are testing
the printer (with normal use load) in this setting.
So far we have had no jamming problems with the front paper feed since changing
the "skip past perforation" setting. We have not tried the rear paper feed yet.
This printer serves us well in most other regards, especially with regards to
quickness which was one of the reasons we are trialing it out.
So, any war stories/horror stories/good points/whatever would be most welcome,
especially any solutions etc.
Thanks in advance for any replies. Please email or post as per your discretion.
If there are any requests I will try to summarise the replies (if any).
yours truly,
Lou Cavallo
Assistant Programmer
Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research
University of Melbourne
Victoria, Australia.