Epson 880 Printing Colored Splotches, even with b/w
 

Greetings earthlings,

I've got an Epson 880 Stylus. It's served me well for some time (and also eaten up a lot of outrageous cartridge fees, of course...)

However, lately, whenever I print, the entire page comes out with what looks like tiny blue and red splotches, very faint. What's weird is that this seems to be a printing subsystem thing, and maybe not a printer problem:

1) Even if I do:

$ echo "hi" > /dev/lp0

The *entire* page has this colored marking. It should be just the one b&w line.

2) It doesn't matter what kind of file I'm printing, what application it's printing from, etc. -- always the blotches.

3) I can still read the printouts, the blotches are faint. But it's really annoying, and wasting expensive ink.

4) I've tried starting and stopping lpd and CUPS in all possible combinations. Nothing prints with CUPS, only with lpd. I'm confused about what's "default" for my distro.

Specs: Redhat 9, kept up to date with, uh, up2date.
Kernel: 2.4.20-20.9

I've not found anything relevant in dmesg.

-pat

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unnecessary pirate day joke: a pirate walks inot a bar with a steering wheel in his pants. the bartender asks him why he has a steering wheel in his pants. the pirate says "aaargh, matey, it's driving me nuts."

sorry.

look in manual to see how to clean the print heads

Thanks for the reply. I did use the trick where you hold down a certain button until it runs the cleaner. I don't have my manual anymore, is there some other way to clean print heads?

But, that doesn't explain why the *whole* page should be covered with these splotches, or why they would show up on a b&w only page.

Does it?