Epson Stylus CX4200 Inkjet Printer

Owned it about 1 year and made about 50-100 prints in that time. Then it stopped printing, saying cyan ink was out. Bought a new cartridge, same problem. Called tech support; thats where you repeat the online troubleshooting page you just finished doing, but in case youre really dumb, they read it to you. Bottom line, its a hardware problem, so they give you the phone number to the closest repair facility...of course, they give the FAX number. Then they bring you to their loyalty page. Loyalty is a TWO way affair...it requires Epson to make a good product so Ill buy another product. Im sure Ill be lining up to make another Epson product purchase...NOT!

Have had this printer for about a year, scanner works great, printer worked great. Until now. Now it says the color cartridges are out and refuses to print in black & white without the color cartridges. Except the color cartridges arent actually out. Theyre about halfway full. Wonderful. Will never buy from Epson again.

For years I used Epson printers, but the CX4200 was a chosen as a home/office solution. Was I wrong. Epson, in its greed, requires the use of color even when most printing is black and white. They also placed a chip in the cartridge that stops the printer when the chip is removed, shaken and reiniserted. Even if there is ink remaining. NEVER BUY EPSON.

I inherited this printer, so it sat in a box for over a year before I used it. Even after sitting for so long it still worked--ink and all. When the printer stopped working because Of low ink, I replaced all ink cartridges and was back to printing. This is a small, space efficient printer/scanner. The replacement ink cartridges are economical--three color cartridges for about $30.00. I also own an HP all-in-one printer with fax. The HP is a workhorse, but the cost of ink is double the price of Epsons cartridges and last about as long. If your printing needs are modest, youre not printing your novel or 40 pages of notes a day, this is a reasonable printer to consider. The print quality is great, and photos can be printed directly from your camera.

This printer ends up costing a fortune in ink. It always prints with all the colors, even if you select black only, and it does not print if any cartridge is removed or empty. It always tells me my cartridges are empty when they are not. It runs out of ink after printing about 20-30 pages of low-quality, black-only. It never seems to have ink when I need it most, which is frequently very inconvenient and has caused me to decide to buy a new printer even though technically this one is still functioning fine. Perhaps mine has some kind of problem, but I would certainly not take the risk and buy it again - nor will I be buying any Epson for my next printer if I can help it.

Im sorry to say that this printer is a real lemon. Id not had it long, when suddenly it gave me an error message to replace the magenta ink cartridge, which I did, but then it wouldnt print saying that all the ink cartridges needed to be replaced. I had just replaced magenta, so I humored it and replaced them all with brand new Epson ink, and guess what! it still says they are all empty! it wont print now, and I contacted the epson customer service and they accused me of using bad ink. Its Epson ink Im using, and wasting money replacing brand new cartridges to boot!! Dont ever by an Epson. I have a friend that has another model, and when I called to ask to borrow her printer to print a document she told me it was not working because it was telling her it was out of ink even though shed put in all new cartridges! What a rip off.

Not only will it not print without Color ink. It will say your out of color ink when your not. Im not just saying this out of frustration. If you pick up an empty cartridge, you can tell from the liquid moving around in it that its nearly full. If thats not enough I put it on a scale, 0.1 of an oz difference. Expect to have to purchase ink every other time you want to print something. As for functionality of the scanner and everything else, well that all works fine. The scanner is not very fast but it works alright. Its prints okay pictures.

The printing only works when ALL the ink cartridges have ink - including pages that only require black ink. Here is how I found out: I just got a great deal on black ink for the Epson CX5400 that was clearence priced at Staples. I even bought an extra cartridge. After installing the black ink and then trying to print out a text document, I found out that the Epson company wasnt going to let me print text (black ink only) documents unless I also buy the cyan and magenta ink cartridges too. What a screw over! So I threw the Epson Stylus CX5400 in the garbage and will NEVER buy from Epson again.

Hi guys, I just got one of these printers for juts a few bucks. There are a few workarounds to the black and white printing issue. This may be helpful for those who have this printer. Heres a free program that will trick the printer into thinking it has a never-ending supply of ink: [...] Theres also an extensive blog post with solutions here: [...]

I like this printer most of the time, but Ive become upset with one very poor design flaw: black-and-white printing is disabled unless the color ink cartridges have ink in them. As their website says, Q: Can the printer still print if an ink cartridge is expended or not installed? A: No. The printer will not operate if any cartridge is expended or removed. Its best to always have extra cartridges on hand. With this bizarre design, not only is it best to have extra cartridges on hand, but necessary. If you run out of any color ink, you can no longer print in black and white--very inconvenient.