Godfrey
somewhat colored
Yeah, I'm waiting for mine to die too. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it's produced at least 3x its designed for service life in prints. !!
I stopped using anything other than Epson K3 inks a long time ago. All the third party inks proved to be problematic. I also stopped using QuadTone RIP when the author (Roy Harrington) told me, "It's pretty much obsoleted by the K3 inkset, good color management profiles, and Epson's own implementation of Advanced B&W printing workflow."
Most of the time, I print from RGB masters with a full color managed workflow using a custom display calibration and profile (Xrite hardware generated) and paper profiles for output. When I'm working with monochrome B&W TIFF files, no RGB, then I use the Epson ABW workflow and work with the printer driver's options to achieve the right tones and density.
G