Bloody Epson! Need to clean print heads

In the last couple of months I have been getting worried after reading quite a few stories from people with Epson printers that are failing. Especially because I recently bought my olds an Epson printer for Christmas so they can print out their photos.

Today my R200 has gone potty! I have only had this printer I believe just over a year! (I guess that means its out of warranty?) It has decided to suddenly not recognise any of the ink cartridges. I have also discovered that at the right hand side some black ink has been leaking down and onto a screw under where the stationary print head usually rests to the left of the sponge pads.

So far I am trying to clean up the spilt ink using tissues. I have also removed all the ink cartridges from the print head so more ink can't leak down.

It seems this is a common problem as others have also had this issue:

And a search of comp.periphs.printers brings up many posts with people have issues with Epson printers. And the number one issue seems to always be the print heads getting clogged.

In the past I have never had any problems when I used cheaper HP and Canon inkjets where I had the same printer for many years, and Epson supposedly have more expensive and advanced print heads?

I guess that going for an Epson printer with it's high resolution figures and fancy Durabrite Ink cartridges has it's drawbacks, and the biggest one is the reliability of the print heads?

If anyone has any information by the way on how to clean the print heads for my Epson R200, I'd be very grateful. I suspect that they probably need cleaning and hopefully I should be able to do this without any more problems.

Cheers for your help

John

Note for future: Always buy extended warranty with Epson printers!