The Minolta EP-410Z: Part 1, Intro

Welcome back.

Well well well, if it isn’t my old friend “old technology that is categorically worse than modern equivalents, and also broken”. So good of you to join me.

This week, I purchased a Minolta (pre-Konica-Minolta) EP-410z copier for pennies, from a man cleaning out his hoarder father’s house. He was just happy to see it gone.

There is so little written about this machine, or it’s siblings, the EP-415z and EP-425z available online. I suppose that anyone responsible for purchasing, maintaining or repairing them wouldn’t have had the internet at all, given the copier was released in 1988. Lucky for me, a German artist (and possibly historian) blazed the trail.

Unfortunately, I don’t speak German, and there is no transcription available, but his detailed demonstration was enough to convince me to adopt the unit off of craigslist. Based on scattered sources, many of which are archival text on shifty-looking websites, I’ve been able to piece together some key information.

Data Found, Data Lost

Again, since this machine was sold in the late 80s, and models tend to be updated on a one or two year cycle, there would never have been a reason for Minolta to list it online. It is safe of them to assume that all EP-410s have long-since died and been thrown away, so there’s very little reason for legacy support. Given that it’s now 2019, the copier is thirty-one years old, which is sixteen to twenty-four years longer than most office equipment manufacturers offer sustaining parts and info. There are no digitized datasheets, manuals or service books on the web. Zero. Absolutely nothing. Trust me, I’ve checked. Again, by 1995, the 410z was seven years old, and no one was digitizing manuals in that era, much less for an obsolete photocopier.

What I have managed to find, is some very basic information.

1. The EP-4xx models are analog photocopiers. That means they have no digital memory. Every time you want to copy a page, the illuminating element must pass over the page again in order to transfer the information to the drum. More on that soon.
2. The EP-410z is capable of printing in six colors, including white! I’d be surprised if there was a source for new toner bottles anymore. This is probably going to be a matter of buying generic and funneling the stuff into an old bottle. Several sources purport to sell compatible toner, but I don’t believe them.
3. The copier is capable of scaling, which means the optical scale is changed by moving lenses around. By adjusting the distance between the receiving lens and the paper, it basically operates as a zoom lens on a camera, where the paper is the film.
4. There is a known power supply issue, which is fixed by a simple trimpot calibration.

Bringing it Home

The EP-410z is too heavy and cumbersome for a single person to lift. When I tried it out at the seller’s house, it required two people to set it up on a table. He assured me he had copied with it earlier that day. Unfortunately, it was already not working. I could feel the internal power supply humming at 60 hertz, and after some time, the power light would flicker on, but only for a moment. Each time, it seemed to run out of energy as soon as it attempted to move the scan head.

I brought it home anyway, with surprisingly little wrestling to get it in the trunk of my CR-z. To be honest, it would have been easier in the truck. Regardless, a lot of very frustrating searching later, I stumbled upon this odd Blogger page. It appears to be a rip of some text that was present elsewhere, possibly in some paywalled PDFs on ScribDB, but it was all I needed. Per Berny Buta (The Copier Doc)’s advice, the stuttering power failures are a simple fix. The section reads as follows (with formatting restored to the best of my ability):

EP-410z

MULTIPLE SYMPTOMS:

Problem: Very strange behavior, symptoms will change erratically.

Some of my symptoms:

• Jamming at the first switch, then changes to jamming at the fuser switch
• If you unplug the machine then replug and turn it on there are no display lights and the machine acts dead.
• If you wait in that condition the machine will start ticking faster and faster until all the lights pop up and the machine runs fine.

Solution:

• Locate P U 1 board (DC power unit) on the back of machine, in lower right hand side.
• Check at P J 2, the only two pin connector on that board. Voltage should be 5.2V
• If not, adjust the pot to get correct reading.

-Berny Buta, The Copier Doc.

Up Next

In this series of articles, I will attempt, to the best of my ability, to document the EP-410z in plain English, and compile some simple guides for maintaining and operating such an old analog copier. It always saddens me when no one has written a thing about an odd piece of hardware I find, so I’d like to leave a trail for the next adventurer who picks up one of these relics.

Part 2 is up! Read it here.