I can only speak from my personal experience. My 3880 has not had a clog or required a head cleaning in 4 years.
Wonderful, but irrelevant. The Epson 3880 would not be a better choice than the Espon 4900.
Many others in this forum have had similar experience. In this same forum, others have reported terminal 4900 head clogs and the need to keep the printer in constant use to minimize the repeated clogs. Unless there's a conspiracy afoot in this and other photography printing forums there is a clear difference between the reliability of these 2 printers.
Well, that's true. The Epson 3880 doesn't have the build quality, nor the convenience, of the Epson 4900. For someone expecting to run off 70 8x10's at a time, the Epson 4900 is a much better choice in terms of reliability.
The OP wants something that can just be turned on, produce high quality prints, and turned off or go unused for months.
That's not quite what he described though. He wants to make 1000 prints, as many as 70 at a time, over the course of a "school year". The machine will go unused for one interval per year.
That schedule makes operation very easy. When a production run is started, the first operation is to print a Nozzle Check, which takes a few seconds and uses a couple inches of paper and an insignificant amount of ink. If it isn't perfect, a Nozzle Clean routine is run. That takes only a bit longer, uses no paper, and a very small amount of ink.
In fact, if the printer is turned off when not being used the Nozzle Clean can be set up to automatically happen when the machine is turned on. All that would need to be done normally is to print a Nozzle Check while checking ink and paper.
If the printer is in use once a week or so it is exceedingly unlikely that anything more than the above will be required. It also allows checking the paper roll and the ink supply at the same time, so the basic routine is a good practice anyway.
If the printer ever does need more attention, and that is very likely at the beginning of each school year, the process to clean a severely clogged head is extremely simple. Feed a large sheet of paper and give it a simple image that will put at least something in the middle of the sheet, and poor a puddle of isopropyl alcohol into the paper and allow the head to move through it several times. End of "problem". If that is too much effort, perhaps printing a Walmart is a better solution anyway! :-)
The time "wasted" and the amount of "frustration" over the above with the 4900 is significantly less than just the amount of time and frustration that will be experience waiting for a 3880 to finish the job, compared to the 4900 which prints about 2.5 times as fast.
If students will actually be operating the machine the ease of use needs to be considered too. Sheet feeding is comparatively error prone for newbies, while roll paper requires much less fiddling.
In my Internet opinion, the 3880 is clearly the best shot at achieving this goal with reasonable consumables costs and no need to learn how to soak and clear delicate print head in a classroom setting with no IT support. Stubborn clogs that prevent a room full of students from printing their projects would be a big deal IMO.
Do you have any experience with commercial grade printers other than the 3880 you recommend? I'll grant that there are situations where a 3880 is ideal. This is clearly not one of them.
