I've got four Epson P800s, a P900, a P5000, an old 7900 and a canon i1000 and between them and regularly print between 50 and 300 prints a day (depending on the time of year and demand, sometimes more).
- The i1000 has the best paper feed of all of them, but also has limited full-bleed capabilities at different sizes, so if you want full-bleed 11x14, you'd be better off with the P900.
- To save time, we do a lot of full bleed prints in the printer vs any trimming, so that's important to us. If you're printing with a margin/border, it might not be.
- I've found getting the color right on the Canon to be a much harder prospect — we went from 3380s to P800s and the color was nearly the same out of the box. Getting the i1000 to look like the p800 was a much harder process for me. I know a lot of folks milage varies and they are happy with the i1000, but even using Colorrite's i1 studio a few times, some prints just don't match what I'm getting on a similarly calibrated p800, p900 or 7900.
- The P900 does feel like a little better detail in darks than the P800.
- The P5000 is a big printer, but it's feed mechanism is better than either the P800 or P900 — you can set a big stack in the feeing tray and usually it "just works." Of course, it wont' do full bleed on 11x14 either, so again, if that's important I'd look @ a P900. I don't find the colors as vibrant on the P5000, even after calibration, but totally within tolerance.
- The P900's feed mechanism has not improved over the P800s, if anything, in my experience it has gotten worse. I print 95% on matte paper (red river, usually) and out of the box the P900 wouldn't always grab an 11x14 sheet.
- The P900 also has a much slower manual feed than the P800, and I've been really disappointed with it. The P800 would just take the paper much more easily, where as the P800 makes you wait a bit and press a button twice before it feeds (once to start, again to load).
Since I overprint so much, I do a lot of maintenance on the P800s, basically cleaning out the sponges and trying to freshen the rollers. Since I'm only doing matte I never really have the problem of "switching inks" like the P900 fixes.
Like other folks have said, if you're not printing regularly, things will get clogged and ink will be wasted. These printers were made to be used regularly. I let the i1000 sit for a few weeks and it basically emptied the cartridges trying to clean and get it back printing... which is expensive.
My fantasy printer would be a P5000 with the P900 inks, the i1000's vacuum feed and cheap user-replaceable overprint sponges.
