Epson does not exceed my vision

To whom it may concern:-

I'm fed up. I really am. I have spent the last hour trying to print a nine page essay for my university course. From the third Epson printer I have owned. The first one came free with a computer I bought and printed green when I wanted red or yellow when I wanted blue and was finally replaced by the shop I bought the computer from. The quality of the second (same model as the first) was marginally better. At least it printed the colour I chose rather than some randomly picked hue. But the third. The third has gone far beyond the first two in its annoying idiosyncrasies.

The stats looked good. It had a fancy name. Epson CX3100 multifunction printer sounds like a class act. If only. Multifunction? What a misnomer. More like multi-malfunction, for since I have owned it, this printer has gone where no printer before it has gone in exploring new ways to function inappropriately. The scanner stopped working, rendering the copying function useless, and leaving me with the print function alone.

Well you would assume that the print function should be all right since after all, this machine claims to be a printer. Alas how naive I was. This printer prefers to mess with minds rather than print documents. Let’s begin with the ill-conceived document feeder..what a place to start. It jams and then continues fruitless attempts to feed 50 odd pages through at once finally printing on the same line of the piece of paper it cannot feed through over and over again until the ink gleaming on the page is an inch think, and for the next 100 documents black patches of ink appear at regular intervals on the top of the page. Alternatively it might decide to misfeed so that the one page of the document prints hard up against the top of the page leaving Sahara size regions of white at the bottom of the page. Another of its party tricks is the ol’ feeding it through on an angle trick, which leaves one with a piece of paper with a gradually decreasing white margin.

And let’s not forget the print quality. It is appalling. Gutenberg's first printing press had clearer type quality. No matter how many times one cleans the heads or faffs around with 'maintenance' settings, it refuses to print clean lettering. If I wanted a strikethrough effect on all my documents, I'd select it in my word processor. Then to make matters worse, after finally having got the print quality from ridiculously poor to slightly better than ridiculously poor, the next time one attempts to use the printer, the type is back to unreadable, with missing lines of ink. So again one must clean the print heads using up more of Epson’s completely over-priced ink. How is it that humble black ink is bordering on the price of gold per ounce?

Which brings me to changing ink cartridges. How is it that my colour cartridge runs down when I’m only printing black text? Why is colour ink consumed when I want to clean up the quality of the black ink printing and vice-versa? Why do I need to install a new colour cartridge when I only want to print with the black cartridge? The only way any of this makes sense to me is to assume it is some ploy by your sales team to increase revenue.

Every time I attempt to print a document now, I have to retry at least three times, fiddling with maintenance settings in an attempt to get a type that is passable in terms of readability. Reams and reams of paper are wasted in the process. I swear that my Epson CX3100 is solely responsible for vast swathes of destruction in the Amazon rainforest. But alas this darn machine has crossed me for the last time. No longer will I endure its petulant shenanigans. I have decided to introduce it to my trusty friend Mr Claw Hammer. I will not sell this machine to some unsuspecting citizen. No, I could not inflict this on my worst enemy.

So I'm off to buy another printer. And I assure you it will not be an Epson. I have been driven to distraction with your printers which in my experience are the poorest quality printers around. I have never had such problems from the HP printers which I have used. I will never purchase another Epson product until I hear there has been a vast improvement in quality, and I will tell all my friends and family about my experiences with your piteously inadequate products. Your by-line at the moment is “Exceed your vision with Epson”. The only thing of mine that has been exceeded by Epson is patience.

Yours mostly sincerely,
Scott