I'm finally thinking of getting around to buying a photo printer. I do most of my printing at Mpix.com but I'm getting frustrated with the slow cycle time of the print - ship - see results - adjust colors - reprint cycle. I think it's time to bite the bullet and bring printing of small images (probably only as large as 8x10) in-house. I look forward to tweaking colors and printing endless 4x6's until it looks right and then taking the resulting file over to Picture Element and saying "make me a big one like this". I've heard such great things about Epsons and such horrible things about Canons that I think I'm going to go with an Epson. After shooting a Canon SLR for a couple years I can only imagine the anti-photographer workflow their printers must have, and the original experience of Michael Reichman over at The Luminous Landscape seems to bear this out. (Note: He did have a much better experience with the newer iPF6100, but still...)
So the next questions are:
1) How big? 8x10? 11x17? 16x20?
2) What quality? Each brand seems to have at least two choices in each size.
3) Is Epson going to announce anything for PMA next month?
I'm currently thinking of an R1900, a 2800, or maybe something as extravagant as a 3800. I'm doing all sorts of spreadsheet calculations to figure out what the break-even point on each of these printers is (based on usage) and trying to do as much research as I can.
One nice little nugget of web info is Eric Chan's excellent Epson 3800 FAQ.