Short answer, YES!
The 78xx and 98xx series seem for me at any rate are quite reliable; dare I say the most reliable of Epson printers? I spent years babying two old EPS 4000’s so I know just how aggravating Epson printers can be. I have in the last year stepped up to a 9880 which after a small spate of imperfect nozzle checks when I first got it home, after a three hour ride being bounced around in the back of my pickup, but since then it has not printed a single imperfect nozzle check in about 9 months. Harvey Head Cleaner prints nozzle check pattern every day, so I know this for an absolute fact. As well it has never printed an imperfect print as long as I have owned it.
So you are looking at the 78xx series, let me tell you after reading through the service manual for this series the 98xx series has a much longer service life, in some aspects. Case in point, carriage movements before you get a service call error for CR motor replacement in the 78xx series is 3.7 million cycles whereas the 98xx series is 6.3 million cycles. See page 197 of the service manual if you have access. So I think I might be inclined to look at the 44” printer simply for the extended service life it seem to provide irrespective of the need to only print smaller sized prints.
That is the good news; the bad news is that they seem to piss away prodigious amounts of ink doing startup cleanings no matter what you do as far as turning off auto cleanings/nozzle checks etc. Mine seems to dump about $50 worth of ink in the service tanks a month, even if I print absolutely nothing except my daily nozzle checks which tell me exactly how much ink gets used start to finish. Now of course you can limit this by turning off the printer all together until you need it, but then you run the risk of major clogs with attendant power cleans and or high dollar non-warranty service calls with massive parts costs as in head replacement. By the way if you leave it off for 5 days it will do a startup head clean that will dump just about 20cc of ink every time.
So there you go, my two cents, just of the asking.
Later Larry