My condolences, Rob. I know how painful it can be when your printer starts acting up. Had it happen last summer with my beautiful new Epson 3880, which, incidentally, does some of the best B&W I've seen. Usually, when a printer starts screwing its prints the problem's a blocked nozzle that shows up right away as banding, or at least as a very pronounced color change. But with the 3880 it didn't. The color prints just "didn't look quite right." Finally I ran a nozzle check and found that the light magenta nozzle was blocked. Cleared it and the problem went away immediately. Which leads me to observe that although having nine or more heads in a printer can help the printer produce sterling work, it also can screw things up subtly enough that you don't really quite catch it at first. Next time I'll know. And there's always a next time.
Actually, I have to make a confession. I've dated virtually all the scans I made from negatives from about 1966 to 1972 as 1968. I made contact sheets of all the B&W's and carefully stored the transparencies back in the days when I shot them, but I screwed up and didn't date the contacts. On the other hand, I do have a series of comb-bound books I made with back-to-back, dry-mounted 8 x 10s, year by year and season by season, and the books are dated. If I ever got enough time to do it, I'd be able to associate the roughly dated prints in the books with the contacts. I know there are dates on some of the transparencies, and I could change the dates on those scans.
But why bother? I'll let some grunt in a museum do all that once I'm world famous. If I do it now, it'll spoil the poor guy's fun, and he won't be able to use the search and correlation for his PhD thesis.