In any choice between a thermal bubble jet (HP/Cannon) and a piezo crystal ink jet (Epson/Brother) I will always choose piezo. Thermal bubble jets are more prone to failure over time. HP used to put replaceable print heads in their higher-end printers, but now the whole printer is just considered disposable. And ink prices are terrible. I actually wrote
an article on why not HP if you're interested.
As far as the Epson, the 4740 you are considering is very much like my WF-7720. I do like this printer, but do be aware that Epson is beginning to go the way of HP on ink prices. Epson does one of two things. They sell you Eco Tank printers, that use dye inks and lock you out of basic features like borderless printing, or they sell you printers that use good pigment inks and have full features but that have tiny, high priced ink cartridges. To get any sort of decent price per page you'll have to use third party inks. The WF-4740 uses 802 ink cartridges and you can't get auto-reset chips for them, so any refillable cartridges will have to use single-use chips. Even the refillable ink specialists
say to get a different printer if you intend to print a lot.
The other drawback of Epsons is their rasterization. Their ESC-P/2 printer code it uses can't even really be called a printer language. The way it rasterizes greyscales, for example, is terrible:
So, to answer your question, I would recommend neither of your choices. I would recommend a Brother. The most versatile printer I've ever owned is my MFC-J6945DW. It has PCL and Postscript, it has great print quality, actually does better photos than 4-colour durabrite Epsons, has better paper management, and it uses large, pretty reasonably priced cartridges (for the amount of ink they have) but also has refillable cartridges (with auto reset chips) available if you want. It will do borderless printing on normal paper (which no Epson will do) at all sizes of papers that the printer supports. My 6945DW will print up to 11x17, but if you don't need that large you can get one of the smaller versions. But for the price per page, if you can afford the space, I recommend the large format printer. I mean, why not have a printer that will do small posters in addition to everything else. The nice thing about the 11x17 brother is that it's wide enough that it prints 8.5x11 sideways in landscape, which makes for faster print speeds.
I really can't say enough good things about the recent Brother printers.
