Our Epson 800 gave us the same problems scr4 mentioned. I’m about to turf it, which is a pity as we have about 3 spare sets of new color/black cartriges for it.
Oh well.
Oh, I hated my Epson printer. The colors were never the same as on the screen, and it was slooooooooooow. It often jammed, often smeared and often printed half a page. I am so glad I got an HP! I love it to death-beautiful picture quality-mich better than the Crapson, and is amazingly fast.
my epson worked about a year, threw it out. my friends with epsons all of them died too ( the printers died that is ).
i will never go back to inkjet really, its either Laser or LED. i have OKI LED now. The thing basically only has a single moving part - the drum, and it weighs about 4 times more than epson, though half the size. i think i can throw it through a wall and it will not be damaged, the epson inkjet was only good for making whiny noises though.
that is also why you dont see me bying a pre-packaged system such as Dell or Gateway or whatever. i chose every part of my system myself : case, power supply, case fans, cpu cooler … all purchased separately and i have read reviews of EACH part before buying them.
inkjets like to break, epson or not, inkjets are crap. inkjets and floppy drives are two things i positively can’t stand.
Ebay.
Re the laser printer recommendations; that’s fine if you only want mono output, but I couldn’t get by with that and colour laser printers cost and arm and a leg.
mangetout, about the color … when i bought the BW led printer i still had my color epson kinda working, some of the time … so my father wanted to keep it. a few months ago i finally threw it out, making it a point to slam it on the pavement … my father still haven’t noticed that its gone ( he forbid me to throw it away ) yet he frequently uses our led printer, mostly to print out credit card and other statements from the web. yet he INSISTS that we NEED a color printer.
the truth is, i do not see a point in printing out photos. the quality simply does not compare to that i get on my monitor, of course, my monitor costs as much my entire PC including the printer 
but i think thats reasonable.
what is the point of making digital pictures so that you can put it on paper making it into a regular picture ? i say keep it digital all the way from CCD to LCD and don’t forget the VGA cable in between - it has to go ! use a digital DVI cable/monitor/video card.