Re: Looking for a good photo printer

IMHO
The reason Epson should remain the top, but not only choice, for most
users 
is that Epson manufacturers a wide variety of paper surfaces and bundles 
good canned paper profiles for Epson papers with their printers.
This makes achieving high quality results somewhat easier with Epson 
printers and Epson papers with less futzing.
Epson ink is expensive and you have to be religious about avoiding clogs.
I highly recommend the Epson r1800 for photo printing. If you do not want
to 
deal with gloss optimizers for glossy prints, really a non-issue, then I 
would get without hesitation the new replacement for the venerable ink
based 
1280, the model number escapes me.
My experience with the previous generation of Canon printers was very 
frustrating as I did not find Canon's profiles for the pitiful few paper 
surfaces they sell to be as reliable as Epson's and Canon's methods for 
color management unintuitive and not necessarily reliable. Perhaps this
has 
changed with newer drivers, but since Canon still does not sell a variety
of 
paper surfaces with canned profiles (matte or glossy, take your pick) you 
are on your own in this regard. Also Canon, more than other printer
vendors, 
tends to sell "new" generation printers that use the same ink as prior 
generation printers so they are hardly "new," just repackaged.
Most of the reviews I have read of newer high end HP printers (apart from 
the massive roll paper professional uints which appear to be the state of 
the art) are from sites where issues about color management are not 
considered. However the reviews have been favorable and HP sells more
paper 
types than Canon.