I don’t do a lot of printing at home, maybe a few sheets every six months, so when I bought my Epson CX4600 printer a couple years ago I figured I’d be set for a while.

Well, that’s changed.

I went to go plug it in Tuesday morning and kaput. Nothing but blank pages spewed out when all I was trying to do was make a simple one page copy of a document.

I did the diagnostic thing. The ink was good, no error lights were flashing and everything was connected properly and in working order. ADHEREL

Next step was to poke around the internet and see what I could find. Turns out many people have had this same problem – blank pages coming out of a seemingly working ink-filled Epson CX4600. Apparently this can arise from the ink print heads getting clogged up or hardened due to lack of use (my case) so the ink cannot travel from the cartridge to the print head. Or something like that. Either way, not good and very frustrating. Especially so if you just plunked like a $50 on new print cartridges.

But fortunately for Epson they have a very very responsive customer service department. I called the number which you can find on their website (okay, I’ll list it: 562- 276-4382) and minutes I got a guy in tech support. He was very helpful, very pleasant. He understood my problem right away but said that the machine had to be repaired by a technician – there was nothing I could do – and that the one-year warranty had expired. However, he kindly overlooked the warranty issue and the $10 bucks or so those out of warranty folks like me, according to him, had to pay to use their phone support.

Since nothing could be fixed over the phone I was then transferred to another support guy who explained to me my options. Again, he was very helpful. I was told since it was probably cheaper just to buy a new printer than it was to get it repaired locally (quite true and rather refreshing to hear such honesty!), Epson could give me some good deals on a new printer or upgrade. But given my experience with this one I took a pass on getting a new another.

Next option I was told was to have the printer sent back to Epson for a free repair on Epson’s nickel. Free repair and you guys pay for the shipping? Sure, sign me up. I’ll take it. So they are going to mail to me some packing stuff in a few days and I simply have to pop the printer into the box, FedEx it out, and some six weeks later it comes back in working condition.

To be honest, while I’m not overly impressed with the printer itself (though when it did work it printed pretty well, even the photo printer was pretty good, but this problem should not be happening!), I have to give high marks to their friendly and helpful support folks who still took care of me despite my printer being out of warranty. That kind of customer service is hard to come by these days. Nicely done, Epson…