Seems that the older Epsons have really tainted your views
Having started using Epsons fairly recently (about 4 years) I have nothing but praise for the quality and rarely had to run clean cycles (only if the printer has been off for several weeks, and then not every time). Yes, they drink ink but not much worse than the HP
ahem 'photo' printers I used before.
One thing to note - I believe that Epson photo printers use a little of all colours when printing text, therefore they can be very exensive to run if you want to do general printing as well as photos. I have a very cheap HP Deskjet for that purpose and only print photos on my R1800.
I think that if you want to create high quality prints yourself, whichever manufacturer you chose, you are going to end up using a lot of ink.
Nogbad, I was going to recommend the Epson R260 - it uses the latest print-head tech and Claria ink - but I see it isn't availble in the UK - I guess that the R265 is the equivalent? It will not work standalone (i.e. it doesn't have an LCD and you can't just stick a CF card into it and print) but at half the price of the standalone equivalent, you can either buy another set of inks or a cheap deskjet to do general printing on
Stephen, yes, it is easy to use an online lab and cheaper for the odd print, but you don't get that satisfaction of watching your print coming off the printer...