Hello again. Glad to see more of you have added to this site since I did. I spoke to the Epson help centre Phone no. 0870 4437766 and they told me the problems were not the printer but the papers.
According to them Epson printers do not "heat ink when printing and it cannot penetrate the coating on papers such as Kodak, that you must use Epson papers and that only certain papers are compatable with the C84". A good salesman if nothing else I guess. I have tried original inks and the results are slightly better but not perfect. Perhaps I will try the papers they suggest. They can be found on buyepson.co.uk

good luck!