I never have clogged nozzles with my Epson 3800, even I print once a week or once every other week quite often.
My findings with my first serious printer so far is, on gloss paper color prints will never look as good as these chemical prints out of Lightjets, Chromiras, and LaserLabs. They lack color saturation, the dynamic range, the depth and the 3D feeling, and the smoothness, especially in the shadows.
However, black and white is totally another story. The Canon's and HP's (I did try them out) are deadly neutral. Great, but neutral black and white prints are dead prints. The Epson ABW can add tint easily, and with Roy's QTR RIP you have infinite control over almost everything, but QTR is only available for the Epsons. I made my own custom linearized QTR curves with an Eye-One Pro, and with different color blending for the highlights, midtones, and shadows I am now getting prints that look alive (in comparisons to the pure neutral ones), and almost match Richard Lohmann's hextone results. Especially on the new Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl 320 (gloss) and the old Photo Rag 308 (matte). Even without the custom profiles and curves the canned Epson and QTR profiles and curves work almost the same so the unit to unit variation must be quite minor.
Richard has been testing for Harman/Ilford the new baryta gloss paper on Epsons, that will hit the market soon. He said the prints look and feel really close to the fiber based chemical prints. Unlike many unqualified assertions Richard teaches B&W darkroom twice a week, and certainly knows what he is talking about. After some time no doubt both HP and Canon will catch up, but for now, only Epson has mature products in the market even they do have imperfections.
