Hello,

I have an Epson R380 and it's been great. It's only 5 months old. For some reason my printer started telling me with an error message that the ink cartridge cannot be recognized. This happened 75% through a DVD burn. The black cartridge is about 75% used up. This is so strange. I know some cartridges cannot be recognized but this cartridge has been used for over 2 months. I even put a new cartridge in and it keeps telling me the same thing. I buy my ink from megatoners.com. Has anyone seen this before? If so do you know how to fix it? I have already shutdown the printer many times and let it sit for hours. I have taken the black cartridge out many times and it keeps doing it only to black, all other cartridges are working fine.

TIA!!

MD

I invested in a chip resetter for those times. I don't have the link handy but do a search on e-bay. That's where i got mine from. $6 usd is all it cost me.

I would try another cartridge if you have one. I have the same model and it does the same thing. The ink will not show below 1/4 full, it will finally just say the cartridge can't be recognized. I assume that is just it's way of saying empty. I use G&G ink from supermediastore. I have run about 3 sets through mine so far and the last set I got, I had a bad Cyan cartridge. It would snap in, but it didn't sound and feel right. Tried another cartridge and it worked fine. I am not aware of a chip resetter for this model yet, it has the new chip on the ink cartridges. I haven't researched enough to know for sure, but I would be cautious.

Thanks, I don't know why, but the 2nd new cartridge I put in worked correctly!? The old cartridge must have gone bad and the new one must have been bad. The 2nd new one worked great. Thanks for the replies.

MD

I don't think they go bad, I think that is just how the printer reads the cartridge being empty. All 3 sets I have used read this way.

One theory is that the Epson engineers wanted to protect the printhead from overheating (lack of ink) so they erred on the conservative side when calibrating the low ink warning.
The other theory would be, sales got involved

The cartridges I have used so far drop the same until they get to the 1/4 mark and then they just sit there until it won't recognize them. I think it is using the ink though because once it gets to the 1/4 mark, it still prints alot before it runs out.