Epson 9800 Lifespan

[HiTech_Monkeyboy]

Quick question. What is the expected life of an Epson Stylus Pro9800 and how would it be measured? Is it time, number of prints or feet? Anyone know?

THanks,

Monkey


"The lunatics are in my hall. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor and everyday the paperboy brings more."

 

[Rock Lobster]

Re: Epson 9800 Lifespan

Lately I'm looking at lifespan as a serviceability issue. At a company I was formerly with, we used an Epson 7000 for years and years, only because service was relatively easy and cheap. It had separate and inexpensive head units, so when a colour got too bad, a service tech could easily replace it. Where I am now, we are looking at replacing our Epson 9600 (which was new in 2004) because the head assembly (so I'm told) is a single unit and much more expensive, so the cost of the service call will be too steep compared to the cost of the whole printer.
This may not be the case with the new Epsons, but beware of third-party inks... back on these older machines, it seemed like non-Epson inks clogged the heads way easier.

 

[HiTech_Monkeyboy]

Re: Epson 9800 Lifespan

That's the reason for the question, cost to repair vs replace. Quote from Epson repair service is approx $2500 to replace a print head. That's about half or the cost of a new printer. 9800 uses a single head so it is WAAAAAY expensive. Then less I have to deal with that service company the better too.

 

[Bobmorli]

Re: Epson 9800 Lifespan

We have one 9800 which we have since 2006. About a month ago we had a registar and colour problem. After 4 interventions (2 printhead replacements) we finaly have an acceptable result. But it's not what we had. So after some discussion with Epson we decided to get 2 new 9800. Cheaper than getting the technicians over to our plant another 8 times while we can't produce our proofs (essential for our workflow).

So in my opinion, the lifespan of an 9800 isn't that great if you get technicians that don't know what they should know about the machine.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[MikeCarpenter]

Re: Epson 9800 Lifespan

Our last 9600 they came up three times to replace print head then they decided they couldnt do it in the field so they replaced it on service contract with a refurb

It ran a couple years now we have a 9800

 

[J_Lindgren]

Re: Epson 9800 Lifespan

The life span of Stylus Pro 9800 is defined in number of usage cycles of individual sub-components of the system:
* The main body is specified for 3 700 000 carriage movement cycles.
(This translates to approx. 20 000 pages of B0-size plain paper in "Quality" mode)
* Print head: 28 billion shots/nozzle
* Electronics: MTBF 20 000 POH (Power-On-Hours), assuming 32% duty cycle, power on 11 hrs/day, printing 3.5 hrs/day

Hope this helps.