Printer problems – Epson WF-7520 cancels large print jobs

I recently bought a new Epson WF-7520 printer. I bought it from Harvey Normans, in one of their sales. It’s an A3+ printer, and A3 scanner and copier, and has a fax machine thrown in for good measure. The price was just $300 NZ, which seemed a little bit too good to be true at the time, but we had just moved into our new shop, and needed a decent scanner and printer, and an A3 was definitely a bonus.

It’s a pretty good printer, I have it connected up to 6 machines wirelessly, 4 windows and 2 ubuntu, and set up and operation is as easy as. The scanner is excellent, and you can drive it either from the device or the PC, and the same goes for the fax.

The main issue I have, besides it drinking ink in some circumstances, is that whenever I went to print a high resolution photograph on photo paper, which is automatically “high quality” at least, if the spool file created was over about 5 or 6 megabytes, the printer would just stop (and eventually cancel the print) at some point during the printing. After much investigation and changing of settings, I eventually changed it to not to print until the whole file had spooled to the printer. I did this because I thought it might be the wireless network that was failing. However, the problem still happened. By now I had wasted a lot of paper and ink on partly printed photos, and was getting angry. To me it was obviously the printer that was at fault, and had difficulty believing that an A3 inkjet printer of this quality would not handle a decent sized photo. Some of the image combinations I was trying to print were up to 55meg in size.

While fiddling around with things, I was in the Epson Printer Finder utility, and clicked on the Set up pages, which opened up a web page with some interesting links in it. One of these was to update the firmware. I still have difficulty believing that a printer manufacturer would release a printer with a firmware that did not handle photo files above such a small size, but I thought if there is a firmware update, it is worth a try. Unfortunately it made no difference.

I had been using Windows Picture & Fax viewer to print, so I thought a change of software might help, so I switched to the Canon ZoomBrowser that came with my camera, which seemed to make a difference, but then after several photos, the same thing started happening again.

I have just tried printing off a different PC, my workshop P4 3Gig machine, rather than my Fit PC2I which has had a few issues lately, and I have printed off 4 or 5 photos with no issues! Looks like my Fit is going to get a Windows repair and a good looking at!