Yes, but the 3880 does have a proper maintenance tank, so not an issue in terms of the printer's life-time for that model. The only issue is the price they charge for essentially a plastic box with some absorptive pads in it. Ya OK, they need to be packaged, stored, shipped, distributed and yada, yada. I don't believe Epson, or for that matter any manufacturer, has ever shared any information about the square footage they expect out of one print head in any of their printers, and of course the print-head is the printer - or cost-wise a huge chunk of it. But in any case, technical obsolescence is the determining factor of most of our present day cameras and printers. On the printer side, as they progress from one model to the next, the rate of image quality improvement has really become marginal, because the technology has matured very quickly - when you consider that it was almost exactly 11 years ago
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/printers/2000p.shtmlthat Epson produced the first consumer-grade desktop archival inkjet printer - the 2000P. So, we may now find people hanging on to their printers for a longer time than they would have over the maturation period, unless there is some spectacular breakthrough on gamut or functionality one of these companies is preparing to unleash one of these days.
Of course I still have the prints I made with my 2000P when I bought it back then, images from film scans, and when I compare the print quality from what I did then with what I'm getting now (both digital and film), it's night and day. But it wasn't night and day migrating from a 3800 to a 4900. So I think someone looking to break into professional printing equipment on a tight budget can do very well with a carefully selected current model, new or used, in the 3800/3880 range. These models tend to be the most quiet, clog-free pigment-ink printers that Epson has ever produced. I can't speak for the current crop of Canons or HPs because I have no experience using them.
