Designjet T1300 Ink issue

[jwrycza]

Good morning! My customer replaced the Gray ink in this machine and a message came up saying "cartridge failure" so, he replaced with another and got the same message. They are both brand new OE inks. When he goes to the panel and pages through the colors, the gray says it expired in 1970! The manufacture date is less than a year ago. He believes it is a machine issue. Can I get around this at all? This machine is down without the gray. Can anyone help??

[Kiran Otter]

Remove all of the inks and then insert the grey cartridge and see if they get the same result. It may be a problem with a neighbor cartridge.

I would also update the firmware if it's not up to date. The 500/800 had a similar issue lately with it misreading the dates on the supplies.

Kiran

[jwrycza]

I ran all the ink supply tests and they all passed. I did find a cartridge that lasted a week before coming up with the "cartridge failure" message and now, found another that is working so far. 5 failed cartridges? Seems really odd!

[Kiran Otter]

It happens. The only other thing you can try is put the cartridges in another printer and see if they behave differently.

Kiran

[D Hook]

I had a T790 that kept giving me fits like that. Bought a new cartridge and it registered the date as 12-31-1969, a Unix thing. This one explanation I've found:

If you’ve been running or developing websites for awhile, you may have run into a problem where a field that should contain a more recent date is instead showing up with the date 12-31-1969. Many people may just recognize this as a problem, get it resolved somehow and move on. But have you ever stopped to wonder just why this specific date is the one that shows up when there’s an issue?
This occurs when data that should be a UNIX timestamp is instead either empty or contains a value of zero. UNIX timestamps are integers that count the number of seconds since midnight on 12-31-1969. As you can imagine, nowadays they’re pretty big.
Sometimes a bug in the software will cause these fields to lose their value — maybe during a software update or database migration — and that’s when you see the epoch date (12-31-1969) instead of the value you were expecting. The good news is the software which is rendering out the timestamp to human readable format is doing its job (a timestamp of zero does correlate to that date). The bad news is you’ve got missing values which are going to have to be tracked down.
So the obvious question is why this particular date? Well it’s very early in UNIX’s history (though this date wasn’t actually chosen until 1972), and basically it just seemed to be a good starting point to begin counting from. It’s amazing how many of the standards we live by today were chosen almost arbitrarily sometime in the past!

I'm not programmer or computer savy when it comes to this stuff so don't know if that's all the explanation there is. But I do know that I went through a couple cartridges like that (brand new, OEM, unexpired according the date on the box) and it wouldn't accept either. Got rid of the printer for parts after that. Updating firmware was no help. Didn't have much money into it and wasn't worth the time to go deeper into replacing parts since I would never get the money out of it.

Hopefully others may have a more detailed explanation.