Nightmare on Printer Street: The Epson XP-820

Most of my experiences installing new tech equipment for my clients are very pleasant. However, today’s experience installing a brand new Epson XP-820 printer would definitely be classified as a nightmare.

The ironic thing is that the Epson XP-820 isn’t even the printer I selected for my client. Rather, I selected the less expensive Epson XP-620 which I decided to pick up at my local Office Depot since their website indicated they had one in stock. But when I got to the Office Depot, the manager there told me that the only one they had in stock was the floor model.

Knowing I didn’t want the floor model, the manager very graciously said he would knock $60 off the price of the better model Epson XP-820, thus making it the same exact price ($99) as the lower model I was already planning on buying. I was thrilled to tell my client what a great deal I got for her.

Things took a turn for the bad

But this is where everything took a turn for the bad. When I arrived at my client’s house and began unpacking the printer, I removed all of the packing materials and began installing the ink cartridges. For some inexplicable reason as I was in the middle of this, the internal fax ringer went crazy and started ringing non-stop. The only way I got it to stop was to power off the printer and power it back on again.

That’s when the printer did its initialization routine which took about seven minutes. Except at the end of the seven minutes, instead of being ready for me to run the setup program, it gave me a 0xf3 error. Yeah, that’s all it told me.

I looked through the online manual and couldn’t find anything useful about a 0xf3 error. So I looked online and found that it might be a paper jam. Rather odd I thought since I hadn’t even loaded any paper yet and certainly hadn’t printed anything yet.

Customer support – if you can call it that

At this point, as much as it pained me to do it, I decided to call Epson customer support. This was the worst experience of all. Not only did I get an overseas person who I could not understand, she was also rude to me when I asked her to repeat what she said or tried to guess what she was asking me to do.

On more than one occasion, she hit me with, “Sir, if you could kindly just the answer the question I am asking you.” Ironically, the reason I couldn’t answer the question is because I couldn’t understand what she was asking me.

After at least 30 minutes of this client support person telling me to open this, shut that, remove this, replace that, I turned the printer off and on again and still got the error. Worse yet, the printer never stopped making noises. Rollers kept spinning and the printhead kept moving back and forth.

Sometimes you gotta call a lemon a lemon

At this point, I think the customer support woman gave up to. She started to ask for my mailing address so she could issue a return authorization. I interrupted her and said I didn’t want a replacement printer, I just wanted to take the printer back to Office Depot and get my money back. Her words were, “If you think that is the solution to your problem, okay.” Followed up with, “Have I helped you with your problem today?” Ugh.

To be honest, I wouldn’t replace this printer, even if it didn’t cost me a dime. Besides having some obvious malfunction, the printer itself was still a pain in my (well, you know).

Believe it or not, I was so frustrated by the customer support call that I Googled the problem again on my own and found a solution (not by Epson) that at least made the error go away.

But it still didn’t matter. The trays in front were extremely confusing to figure out. One tray I pulled out and pushed back in and it seemingly went all the way inside the printer. I had to use my fingertips to pull it back out!

On top of that, every time you switch from regular paper to something else, like an envelope, you have to confirm on the display which paper you just loaded by selecting the appropriate option from the menu (why, I have no idea). But this is all irrelevant because when I tried printing an envelope, it never printed right despite me matching the exact layout of the envelope feeder in Microsoft Word.

The only bright star

The only positive that came from buying the Epson XP-820 was the satisfaction I got when I returned it. And I would like to give kudos to Office Depot who gave me absolutely no hassle returning the printer.