EPSON Stylus Color 400 Sounds 

Yeah, I hear you. Though back in my day, it was the sound of a dot-matrix printer--which I still have, and still works over 35 years later. Never knew anybody who had any luck with Epson printers, the ink would always dry up in the heads, requiring copious cleaning cycles, using precious ink. I even developed a way to unclog the heads when it happened, and saved many an Epson from the trash. Back in the day when this printer was king, HP was well ahead of the game because the printheads were part of the cartridge. Yes, that meant the ink cost more but there was never any head cleaning cycles that needed to be run, taking 3 minutes of your time, to wait for that one page to print out. Of course nowadays, all printers, HP included, have permanent printheads which fail prematurely.

Yes, these printers had some unique sounds.

I know the deal! Being able to print in color back in the day was such a luxury.

A lot of people used to have one of them.

I used to sell those when they were new!

These old Epsons were extremely wasteful in their ink usage, and I'm talking about the kind that DOESN'T go on the paper. It was due to their design of permanent printheads, they had to keep purging and purging and purging the nozzles, and it uses what it has on hand--ink--to do that. Oftentimes, the heads clog up on these entirely, and no amount of cleaning cycles will get them to work again. The trick I did on this particular printer, twice. I explained what to do in the video. That might help yours. Also, have you heard Printer Jam by Mistabishi? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-is-HVxmUELQ.html The DeskJet 600s were the absolute best printers. First off, those did NOT have permanent printheads, they were part of the cartridge, so you could always manually clean them. Finding carts for them these days can be tough, they are usually refurbished or refilled, and the end result is hit-or-miss at best. The 600s, most of them, made the most awesome low tone upon finishing a print job and spitting out the last page. And back in those days, as well as the 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, and 1200 series printers, they used a separate stepper motor to drive the cleaning station. The 600s definitely were different from the rest. There also was the 500 series, I have one of them, than can print in black, OR in color. That printer takes just ONE cartridge at a time, a black or a color. And if you print black with the color cartridge, it will do it, but at reduced speed, and it's more of a muddy brown instead of black, because that's what you get when mixing all the colors together. I also have an HP Deskjet Plus, you wouldn't believe the amount of metal in that thing. And that has both parallel and serial connections, it's that old. The 500 series took the same black cartridge, for the most part. My Deskjet 693 was one of the latest in the 600 series, and accepts 2 cartridges as you would expect, a black and a color, but I think was one of the absolutely earliest printers to take a separate photo cartridge, that included black, light cyan, and light magenta. That number cartridge is absolutely UNHEARD OF today, but I have one. Dried up and empty of course, but I have one. They also included a plastic case for the unused cartridge called a "humidor". The later printers that took the 56 black and 57 color cartridges, some also had a 58 photo cartridge that could be accepted. In fact, there was one printer, the model number escapes me, that would take the black, photo, and color cartridge, all at the same time. This of course was back when printing your own photos at home was all the rage.

@@jaykay18 i also have the deskjet 693c. beast of a machine though. i brought it out of storage and hooked it up and actually will replace the epson with the hp. plus i know more about the deskjet too. the photo cartridge was number 16 i think. isn't the sound you mean after the job was finished comes from the paper roller mech raising back up after the last page dropped down? i also love hearing starting a job and as soon as the carraige unlocks it moves all the way over to the left side when the paper loads. do you know why those do that? because it just has to go back over and to the wiping and cleaning cycle before it actually prints anyway.

also, isn't the deskjet plus the 2nd model ever produced?

@@Sethshirtless Oh no kidding! That 693 could do I think 600x300dpi. I have one of those dried up photo cartridges, just a nice piece of nostalgia. Yes, the sound I mean is after the job is finished and the last page dropped. That low, slow tone. The carriage moves all the way over to the left side because there's a device there, and I can't think of its name. Paper load cam? If you look, there's a white or black piece of plastic with a bump on it and a 90° angle on the end. The carriage bumps into that. That presses against the side of a partial gear, which engages with holes in the side of the paper feed gear. The paper feed gear is then driven, and it loads a sheet. A common problem with those printers is that "cam" I guess I'm calling it, would sometimes jump on top of the gear on the side. Or the bump on top could wear down after a lot of extended use, in which case it will not engage and load. Or sometimes the carriage can jam on it. They were very robust; most people stopped using them because they would get a new computer. Now the deskjet 800 series would take the huge 42ml black cartridges that would last and last and last. There were a bunch of others as well, probably a couple 700 series, the 900 series, 1000 series, 1100s, and 1200s, as well as the 9300. The Deskjet Plus was _technically_ the third model produced, before that was the Deskjet. But before that was the Thinkjet. That printer saw a lot of use in libraries' InfoTrac systems, because it was so quiet. It also took tractor feed paper! So yes, the Deskjet Plus was the second one made in the Deskjet series.

@@jaykay18 my scholl disctrict back in the 90's and 2000's used hp and compaq everything. i hated hp printers because of seeing them all over the place, until i got my own old deskjet and i see why they used the hell out of them back then. 600x300 isn't that with the photo cartridge and the highest setting? the 700's were also very good, but the 900's were monsters, those inks held tons. but the fun part of the 600's i think are when prinouts are only like one column all the way down the page and the ink heads only move a small bit and just hearing the sounds of that then. or in other words like doing the print alignment and the square and cross thing it prints out.

Yes, a lot of people have memories of this printer. The way it looked, the way it sounded, the endless cleaning cycles, all that great stuff. And yes, it was a popular printer of the day, probably would even work with Windows 3.1 as it's one of the very early ones.

@@jaykay18 Indeed, though it was been quite a while since i used one last, do remember it well enough still, sounds the same & whatnot too. And being the age that it is, may have worked with Windows 3.1 too. That's my account of this certain epson printer, been a while since i've seen one in action but this is how i remember it from 20 or so years ago.

@@huleeyaxerssius7 Nothing has changed with it, obviously. Printers today are such junk.

@@jaykay18 Not only are they rubbish nowdays, might have those fandangle features that they do but i don't care about for example, but it can even be not too much more expensive, the same price or even cheaper to buy a whole separate printer instead. A printer i got some years back, between 2013-2016 i think, the ink ended up being all used at some point. When it was time for a refill, was too expensive for the ink, so i went without a printer for a few years, went to a public library to print off things if i needed to. And a few months ago i got a cheap printer, and when the time come to refill the ink on it, might cost the same price almost to refill the ink as it did for the printer itself. A good example of why newer is not always better.

@@huleeyaxerssius7 Yes, very true! I was long a holdout of some of the old HP printers that took the #45 black cartridge. Those held 42ml of ink!!! You will never see an ink cartridge that large again! But eventually, the manufacturers caught on, and realized they were charging "far too little" for such an amount of ink, and the prices started going up and up and up. Now, laser is about the only way to go. When it's time for toner, there are plenty of remanufactured cartridges out there. I used to always get the manufacturer's brand cartridges because they worked the best. Now, I will gladly take sub-par output for a cheaper cartridge.

Sorry, no. Maybe archive.org has it? I'm a hardware guy anyway, I really could care less about the software.

+sedn Exactly right. That button is actually an archaic function called "form feed". When there's no paper in the printer, this causes it to load a sheet, otherwise like you said the PC will cause it to auto-load. We used to use the form feed button on old dot-matrix printers back in the day, it would roll the paper forward to the next TOF (Top Of Form), where the perforation was. Depending on the printer, you could tear it off there, or it may have had to have been rolled forward further. Because this is an inkjet printer, but still will take straight text sent to its parallel port (for example, from a PrtScr command in DOS, of perhaps an LLIST command from BASIC), the printer will auto-load a sheet of paper, and print everything that was sent to it. If that spills onto a second sheet of paper, it will finish the first sheet, eject it, and load a new sheet and continue printing until the buffer is empty. At that point, you would press the form feed button, and the printer would eject the sheet. That's its actual function, and there aren't many people out there that know that kind of stuff anymore.

+jaykay18 What are you saying when you said "If that spills onto a second sheet of paper"? Sorry but I'm not understand this "spills" use. I know that when you are printing and the printer is left without sheets the print go to this pause mode (no sheet warning). After this, when you put in more new sheets and you want to continue, you have to push this button and the printing continue in normaly mode.

***** "Spills" means extends over, the amount of information you're looking to print won't fit on just one page, so the additional information goes on to the second page. Yes, you're right, this is also a "continue" button for this printer, it doesn't have a "paper loaded" sensor.

Not really. While way better than the junk they try to pass off as printers today, there were certainly better choices out there when this was new.

Not exactly sure, but based on research it appears that there are drivers for Windows 3.1. Documentation (spec sheet) states 1996, which would make it 18 years old (at the time of this writing), and that kind of makes sense. Back in 1996 a lot of us still had Windows 3.1, and refused to make the switch to Windows 95, because of all the problems/incompatibilities/costs/upgrades that might be encountered, so printer manufacturers were "lenient" with customers and wrote drivers for available operating systems, rather than not supporting and forcing people to buy new. It was different times 18 years ago indeed.

That's for sure!

+Joey P I have one and when I bought it my computer was Windows 95. I believe that I bought it in 1997.

+sedn But the question is do you still use it to this day?

+jaykay18 I have a new printer since same years but my old EPSON Stylus Color 400 printer is here and it was working the last time that I used (9 years ago). Three days ago I bought an adaptor USB to Db25 connector in eBay to test it. I am waiting for the arrival.

Yes, some very unique sounds this printer made.