OK Mabe, sorry - I see where the confusion was. You should put your material outside the other person's quote, otherwise it all looks like yours. So this means you start your stuff AFTER the QUOTE you see above. If you did that, then something is wrong with the Forum software.
Now to your question.
"Waste of ink": maintenance is not "waste" - it's maintenance, which every printer requires, and to date the manufacturers have devised no other option but to run ink through the head and into the maintenance tank for doing this. Sad but true. So the issue boils down to how much each printer model uses in order to keep itself clean, and secondarily, whether users have any control over this behaviour, and if so how much.
The over-arching problem we all have in developing a good comparative understanding of ink usage for maintenance is that the manufacturers have been completely non-transparent about it, neither Canon nor Epson are prepared to change their policies in this regard (based on responses I've received any time I've raised the issue with them), so customers are left to their own devices to figure out what's going on. The folks I've talked with have given reasons for not releasing such information, one of the more understandable being the varying environmental conditions in which these printers are used. Published estimates would need to be normalized for environmental conditions. This last point would be relevant to consumers of review material whose environmental conditions may not reflect those used for defining the specs, or the conditions in which the reviewers of the printers work and would be doing their own verification.
Apart from the issue of environmental disconnects, those of us preparing reviews of these printers when they are new products are under some pressure to do the research and publish within a rather short time frame. This is mainly because our readers, potential purchasers, are very keen to learn what's new and whether they should buy. To do a proper research job on ink used for maintenance without guidance from the manufacturers can be done, but it would take a lot of time, because the printers are programmed to use differing amount of inks under different circumstances that warrant cleaning cycles of variable intensity, so we would need to develop all the basic data ourselves, normally invoking a routine of weighing the maintenance tank at frequent intervals and waiting for the occurrence of all these differing conditions, to really understand the behaviour. That could take quite a bit longer than people would like to wait. That's why you don't see much review material on ink used for maintenance. So we are left with the anecdotal experience of individuals who have experienced this or that circumstance and they report these events. It's not a good basis for coming to reliable comparative conclusions.
I've used all three models we're talking about here - the SC-P800, the SC-P5000 and the Pro-1000 and I'm not able to provide solid comparative information about ink used for maintenance, regardless of my own anecdotal observations on how they perform in this regard, because I have not concerned myself post-publication to do all the time-consuming work needed to comprehensively drill down on this matter.
