In another defense of Epson... I moved in May, and had not used my R3000 since well before then. So it had probably been about a year of the R3000 sitting unused, turned off, hauled from one apartment to our new house, and set up yesterday. I networked my office there because I installed a number of things that work a bit better over ethernet (Epson P6000, 2 Fuji Frontier SP-3000s, and now my R3000). Just to sort of test the ethernet switch, I turned on the R3k to see if it registered. Once it was all powered up and showing up on my mac I though ah what the heck lets try it out. I had been doing some scans of recently shot Provia 6x6 chromes that day. I threw in some 5x7 Moab paper and sent a print from Lightroom using a custom profile that I had set up a while back. The printer did have a bit of an issue grabbing the paper at first, but after a 2nd pass through, it started working.
Voila! A beautiful little 4x4 print on matte paper, no head strikes, streaks, bands, or anything. I never even ran a cleaning cycle. I've owned this printer for around 4 years now, and it's always worked like a champ. I know a lot of people got burned with Epson products over the years, but it seems like the the last gen they really have left the common issues behind.