Why does an S80600 carry ten ink slots when only nine of them hold colors? Because the tenth is not a color. It is one shared position that accepts either a White cartridge or a Metallic Silver cartridge, and the machine sees only one of them at a time. Get that wrong at order time and you are holding a box that fits nothing. Before the next ink order goes out, open the ink bay cover, read the label behind every lock lever, and write down three things: the model, the slot count, and whether WH or MS is sitting in that bay right now. Tape the note inside the cover. It kills most S-Series ordering mistakes before they cost you a week of production.
The Slot Map: Four, Eight, or Nine Plus One
All three 64 inch S-Series bodies look alike from the front. The ink bay is where they split apart.
S40600. Four slots, one per color, CMYK, 700 ml each. There is no second position for any color, so when Cyan runs low you stop and change Cyan. Banner production is rated at 215 square feet per hour and adhesive vinyl at 170, which is about what a single set of four 700 ml cartridges can feed before it needs attention.
S60600. Eight slots, and this is where people miscount. It is not eight colors. It is CMYK twice, so every color has two 700 ml cartridges behind it, 1,400 ml per color on board. That doubled reservoir is what the 550 square feet per hour banner rating actually runs on. If someone orders one cartridge per color for this machine, it prints a shift and then stops.
S80600. Nine color slots at 700 ml: CMYK plus light cyan, light magenta, light black, orange, and red. Then the tenth position, which takes a 600 ml White cartridge or a 350 ml Metallic Silver cartridge. Nine plus one, and that one is a choice somebody made at installation and probably never wrote down.
One rule catches people in the middle of a job: every slot must hold a cartridge. An empty slot stops printing even if that color is nowhere in the file. There is no cheap trick of pulling the White cartridge to keep it fresh while running a CMYK job.
The head side explains the slot count too. The S40600 runs a single PrecisionCore TFP array. The S60600 and S80600 run dual arrays, which is why the S60600 needs eight cartridges feeding one head assembly and why the S80600 has enough channels for nine colors plus the shared position.
Open every cover and photograph the labels today. Two minutes with a phone settles the argument at the counter next month, when the person ordering ink has never seen the inside of the bay.
Why White and Silver Share a Single Position
There is one supply port and one ink line behind that tenth slot. The firmware reads whichever cartridge you seat and reports that color. It does not offer both, and it does not warn you that the other one is gone until you want to print it.
So going from White to Metallic Silver is not a cartridge swap. You pull the White box, seat the Silver box, and then that line has to be flushed and refilled before the first sellable panel comes off. That means cleaning fluid, waste bottle volume, and a machine that is not producing while it happens. Plan the switch between jobs, never on the morning a deadline lands.
The throughput gap is the part that should decide the configuration. Epson rates the S80600 at 135 square feet per hour in White and 43 square feet per hour in Metallic Silver. Silver runs at roughly a third of White, and under a tenth of the machine's banner speed. A 40 square foot silver panel is not a quick proof, it is most of an hour of the machine's day.
Before committing to a colour, pull three months of job tickets and split them into jobs with White, jobs with Silver, and jobs with neither. Multiply the square footage by those two rates. Most shops find White is a weekly need and Silver is a handful of jobs a quarter, and that answer usually says keep White loaded all year and send the rare silver job out.
The real cost of a switch is not the cleaning fluid. It is the hours the machine sits flushing while paid work waits, the media you scrap when the first panel comes off streaked, and the rush freight when the deadline was misjudged. Put that number next to the job price before you promise a date.
Practical scheduling follows from those two rates. Batch the silver work. If two silver jobs land in the same week, run them back to back so the flush happens once instead of twice, and put the CMYK volume on the other days. A shop that keeps Silver loaded all year to serve four orders ends up shaking a slowly settling cartridge every morning for eleven months of nothing.
The Shake Schedule Is Half the Maintenance
Solvent ink settles. Epson says so in plain language in the operator guide, and the schedule that follows is not a suggestion.
- Every cartridge in the bay comes out and gets shaken once every three weeks, all colors, whether or not it is printing well that week.
- White and Metallic Silver come out and get shaken every single day, before the first job.
- Ordinary colors: about 15 shakes in 5 seconds. Orange, White, and Metallic Silver on a fresh cartridge: about 50 shakes in 15 seconds.
- Store a spare White or Silver cartridge on its side, not standing up. Standing, pigment packs into one corner and the first prints after installation come out uneven.
Hold the cartridge horizontally and shake it side to side over roughly 5 cm. Do not whip it up and down. There is ink around the supply port, and a hard vertical shake puts it on your shirt and on the floor.
Two more behaviors from the same guide matter more than most operators expect. Automatic circulation only runs while the printer is powered on, so if the machine will be off for more than a week, run pre storage maintenance before you cut the power. Otherwise you come back to a White channel that needs a long recovery on Monday morning. Second, during long multi copy runs the printer circulates between copies, and the copies can come out slightly different in color. The fix is to run Ink Circulation from the Maintenance menu before the job starts, not after the customer calls.
If tint comes out uneven across a single panel, run Ink Refresh and reprint. Do not reach for a new cartridge first. That order saves a box of ink more often than not.
Under shaking is the quiet failure. A cartridge that got three quick flips will still pass a nozzle check, because the nozzles are firing, and then it lays a faint band into a solid area two hundred feet into the roll. Over shaking has its own cost: ink collects at the supply port, and if you seat it without wiping, that ink ends up on the port seal and later on your hands.
Paste a small card inside the bay cover with the days of the week and the colors due that day. Whoever opens the machine in the morning does not need to remember the schedule, only to read it.
Changing a Cartridge Without Wrecking the Head
Nothing in this procedure is difficult. It is just easy to do in the wrong order at six in the evening.
- Leave the printer powered on. Some of these steps need the machine awake to read the new cartridge.
- Read the label on the new box against the label behind the lock lever. WH and MS are two characters apart and share a slot, so this is the check that actually matters.
- Lift the lock lever, put a finger in the depression on top of the cartridge, and pull straight out. Angled pulls stress the supply port.
- Look at the supply port before the cartridge goes anywhere. If there is ink on it, wipe it with the cleaning stick from the maintenance kit. Do not use paper towel, the fibers stay on the port and travel into the line.
- Take the new cartridge out of its vacuum bag and shake it. 15 shakes in 5 seconds for ordinary colors, 50 in 15 seconds if it is Orange, White, or Metallic Silver.
- Label facing out, seat it fully, then lower the lock lever until it latches.
- Close the covers only after every slot is filled. One empty slot and the machine refuses to print.
Two failure paths are worth knowing. If you pull a cartridge that still has ink and leave it out, the supply port dries, and when you seat it again the seal leaks. Either leave it in or clean the port before it goes back. And when the panel reports the White or Metallic Silver cartridge is expended, change it immediately. The guide is blunt about the consequence: leaving the machine running on that alert can damage the print head or another part, and that is a much more expensive morning than a cartridge.
After a White or Silver change, run Ink Circulation, then a nozzle check, then one short test print on scrap media. A nozzle check alone will pass on a channel that still has air sitting in it, which is why the scrap print belongs in the routine.
Three Messages That Are Not Routine
Most panel messages are housekeeping. Three are not, and each has an order of operations that matters.
Prepare empty waste ink bottle. The bottle under the machine is nearly full. Buy one now and do not wait for the second message. When it flips to Replace waste ink bottle, it is full. Wear the gloves from the maintenance kit, seal the old bottle, push the waste tube into the new bottle before setting it in the holder, then press OK twice to reset the counter. Never change it during a print or a cleaning cycle, waste ink ends up inside the frame.
Replace maintenance parts. The kit is one wiper unit, one flushing pad, and two air filters, and they go in together. Enter through Replace Parts in the Maintenance menu, or wait for the prompt. Fit them without that step and the maintenance counter does not reset, so the machine keeps counting against fresh parts and will stop you early.
Ink cartridge expended, White or Silver. Immediate replacement, no exceptions, for the reason given above.
Write those three strings on a card, in the panel's English and in your operators' first language, and tape it to the machine frame. Night shift does not read the manual, and the White alert is the one that costs a head.
After fitting a maintenance kit, run a cleaning cycle and then look at the nozzle plate with a flashlight before you trust it. A new wiper that leaves a wet film across the plate is sitting wrong or the spring has not seated, and that film is what gets dragged onto the media on the next pass.
None of this replaces a service call when a channel is genuinely dead. But every item above is a decision you can make standing at the machine with a cartridge in your hand, without waiting two days for a technician to drive over.