Racko,

I work for a large company and we have a couple of c80's. Today I received a ticket where an Epson c80 had 'reduced performance + Leaking Cartridges'

Once I got there I was very alarmed to see that the primary reservoir was over flowing, leaving a ugly mess on the left of the printer.

The first thing I did was to search on the internet to see if there is a quick fix and unfortunately, like a lot of the problems I search for there was no real answers, just more questions. I quickly decided to take the printer apart (as it's about 11 months out of its warranty, this printer, now about 3 years old) to see what has actually caused the problem.

The problem I quickly found was due to a design fault on the c80. Below the rollers is a black plate, to the left of which is a ?duct? which leads to the waste reservoir. What seams to happen is the ink is released (for what ever reason, I don?t actually know why they do this, it certainly has nothing to do with the head cleaning cycle) down the duct, once at the bottom after time the ink will dry, with excess moisture being absorbed by a large pad. If you imagine a egg timer, when the printer releases ink into this reservoir and dries, is very similar to the sand of the egg timer building up.

In this case I have spent the last hour cleaning up all the ink. However I am very unsure as to how much the longer will last once put back in service. Also due to the cost of replacing printers these days it is very unlikely to find computer shops that will do this kind of maintenance at an economical price. However some common sense and patients, + Lots of cloth/tissues/mentholated sprit should resolve this issue even if for a short period of time.

I hope this helps.

Many thanks.