Epson PictureMater too slow

<p>I recently bought a used Epson PictureMate Deluxe/Picturemate 500. It's one of the dark grey/silver models, not the new white ones. Takes the 5570 ink cartridge. Two questions. 1) I thought these were supposed to make a 4x6 in about 30-45 seconds. Mine is taking a full two minutes, sometimes about 2:45. Is this normal or is there something I can do to speed it up? I'm getting 2 minutes from a CF card and 2:45 from a thumb drive. 2) The ink cartridge that came with it seemed to be dead and the ink nozzles had to be run through several cleaning cycles to get it working. Finally bought a new cartridge/paper package and got good results. Let it sit for a couple of months and when I went to print it said the cartridge needed to be replaced. Turned it on and off, took the cartridge out and shook it, put it back in, etc., no luck. So I got out the old cartridge that came with it (with a 2007 date on it) and it works fine. Is my new cartridge just bad or something I shyould be donig? I'm hoping to use this for part-time professional event work, but it needs to be reliable.</p>

<p>I believe PictureMate printers were discontinued ? so, perhaps they were waiting for a long time on a shelf ?</p>

<p>Does the printer require the 2+ minutes for every print, or just after having printed for a while? Mine gets very slow if run continuously for 20 minutes or so. Shutting down for 5 minutes seems to solve the problem.</p>

<p>And I think they're very susceptible to problems if not used regularly. </p>

<p>This particular model has been discontinued but Epson still makes an updated model of the PictureMate.<br />I bought this one used, and it did seem not to have been used for a while. After I initially got it working, it sat for a couple of months. As for the bad cartridge, it might have been that the ink drried up where it comes out of the cartridge. But I was surprised that the older cartridge -- which seemed dead before -- worked fine. On timing, yes it takes two minutes on all prints. I had thought maybe it might take two minutes to get the first one out, then the rest would follow in 30-45 seconds, but all are two minutes.</p>