I finally bought a new photo printer; my last one was an Epson Stylus Photo 1270, which was introduced in 2000. The 1270 was impressive at the time, but the ink wasn't very stable and it *loved* to get clogged nozzles, which meant that it wasn't actually all that useful. I managed to produce a few prints from it that I liked, but it took a lot of iteration and wasted a lot of paper and ink, and in the end it was more of a matter of luck than anything. The new one is a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1100, which obviously needs at least one more "pro" in the name. It's a beast that can print on 17" wide paper, and massively more computerized than the old Epson. It's smart enough to detect and fix clogs on its own (supposedly), and includes a bunch of self-checking and calibration tools that probably didn't exist anywhere 25 years ago. For being ~25 years newer and at least one rung up the model ladder, the specs aren't actually *that* different from the old Epson. The Canon has somewhat higher resolution (2400x1200 vs 1440x720 dpi), but they both claim the same minimum droplet size (4 pl). Other than the paper size (13" vs 17"), the biggest spec difference is that the Canon is a 12-ink printer while the Epson was a 6-ink model, which gives is a *much* wider color gamut, so landscapes and portraits look more natural. The biggest difference in actual use, though: I haven't had a bad print yet from the Canon. I've printed 6 or 7 prints in different sizes on a few different papers, and pretty much every single one of them matched what I'd expected to see. Shockingly, it seems to actually print correctly and reliably. Almost every photographic paper manufacturer ships ICC profiles *plus* printer config profiles (for paper thickness, ink handling, etc) for the 1100, and so far everything has actually worked. Download the profile, load the ICC into soft-proofing in Photoshop, load the paper profile into Canon's media tool, tweak so that it looks ok on the monitor, then hit print. A few minutes later there's a perfectly workable print sitting right there. I'd really expected this to be harder, and was expecting to be frustrated for a few days before I actually found a printing process that worked for me.