I spent the better part of my evenings over the last week reading reviews on printers and looking at demos of various printers in stores.
Consumer Reports has a pretty good review on printers that they released just before Christmas. ZDNet's didn't seem to agree with my perceptions, but they had plenty of printers in there. CNet has a review of a set. The best one to me was the one in Consumer Reports.
After reading the reviews and playing with the printers in the store, I decided that I would go with HP. My Epson printer just broke so came in with a negative bias against Epson, Lexmark's cartridges cost too much and I didn't like the quality level of the Canon printers. Then it came down to which HP printer. I decided that the minimum level of photographic quality was the "78" printhead used in the 9xx and P1xxx printers. For the HP 9xx and P1xxx lines, the quality is the same across the board for both lines. They all use the same printheads and the max. resolution is the same. The differences are in accessories and print speed. The P1xxx line reads flash cards from digital cameras directly but otherwise they have the same quality level as the 9xx series. I don't have a digitial camera and figure I can just use my computer to read flash cards when I do, so that narrowed it down to the 9xx series.
Looking at
this table here, the one printer that jumped out at me was the HP 960CSE (which is listed as discontinued in the table). I found the price to be the same as the 950 and 970, it prints double-sided like the 970, it's faster than both of them, and it comes with 4MB more memory. So I settled on the 960CSE, and I was totally impressed with it last night. The speed is great - it spit out a full page at the highest quality level in under 2 mins and the quality is fantastic - my wife literally couldn't tell the difference when I scanned a picture and printed it out.
If you are looking at a cheaper printer, the HP 935C was at my local Sam's club for $139 and it's the same level of photographic quality as the 960. I was tempted but I really wanted double-sided printing for important personal reasons (we print a family calendar every year for Christmas and it takes a lot longer when you have to flip the pages).
edit: I think that I've noticed that the Consumer Reports review isn't free (I'm a subscriber so I'm not sure, but it looks that way) Suffice to say that the top five inkjets in their review are all HP 9xx's.