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I would only use Canon printers for years. A few years back I decided to break away and try an Epson R1800 A3 printer when my Canon printer was killed in a lightning strike. It has turned out to be an excellent printer, and it overcame some of the limitations of its Canon brother as far as print length for panoramas went (driver limitations with the Canon). I now use roll stock for panoramas using the rear roll stock feeder on the Epson.
Ink prices are always a problem - especially with printers that use chipped cartridges, which seems to be the fashion these days.
I used to refill my old Canon A3 printer, so it was very cheap to run. When your printer is cheap to run, you don't mind printing anything (even if it turns out to be a dud for some reason). I always longed for a CIS system on the Canon, but refilling was the next best thing. When you're using chipped cartridges, it's a whole different story. I think you can get around the chips on some printers if you want to refill (I remember the canon printers setting some sort of flag in the printer that voided the warranty if you used refills / bypassed the chip).
I buy third party chipped cartridges now my Epson is out of warranty and they're just fine. This saves a bit of money when you have 8 cartridges to maintain.
As far as quality goes, the Epson R1800 has been an excellent printer with much better build quality compared to the Canon A3 printer I previously owned. I would buy an Epson again (just watch out for the price of consumables).
I've always used Ilford papers for my high quality prints and don't think that you can really go past their pearl paper for top quality prints. You just need to tweak your settings to get the most out of the paper. You can download ICC profiles from Ilford that may help depending on your printer.
Dean
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