before u all jump on the conclusion that the canon i960 is the best photo printer in this price range, just wanna offer my 2 cents:
canon is probably a better overall printer than epson or hp if you print about the same amout of color text/graphics documents and photos and speed is important to you. otherwise, i believe that the general consensus in the photo community right now is that canon i960, epson r300/r200, and hp 7960 have very comparable print quailty on photos printed on glossy papers from their own respective brand. hp 7960 seems to have the best b&w photo quality due to its extra "gray" ink. speed-wise, i believe canon is the fastest. epson printers; however, are by far the most popular and pretty much the standard in the photography circle. sure, more serious photographers might own the epson 2200, r800, or even the newer epson 4000 or higher models (which all use pigment-based inks that last over 100 years), many of them also use the lower-end epson models with dye-based inks such as the epson r300/r200 or the older epson 1280 for larger prints. Couple advantages epson has over canon and hp specically for photographers: 1. epson probably has the most number of different types of photo papers. Not only glossy, it also has matte, semi-gloss, luster, etc... by far the the best selection of different papers to suit your photographic creativity. sure you might be able to find third-party fine-art inkjet photo papers, but remember, all these printers still print the best with their own brand of papers. 2. epson prints also will likely last longer before fading than the canon and hp ones. check out this site for a test:
Print Longevity Testing
based on the test, epson 1280 (which uses the same or similarly formulated inks as the epson r300/r200) did decently well. canon S9000 (which uses the same inks as the canon i960) did pretty poorly. obviously, if having prints that will not fade before you die, you should probably stick with the pigment-based printers such as epson 2200 or epson r800. 3. if you are into printing directly onto cds and dvds, epson r300 and epson r200 are currently the best printers in this price range that can do that. i believe the european versions of canon i960 can print directly onto cds and dvds, unfortunately the american model doesn't come with the adapter to do it. and i don't think you'll be able to find the adapter here in america. epson r200 is currently the most popular cd/dvd printer over in most of the dvd forums since it does a great job and costs less than $100.
anyway, i don't work for epson, just don't want to see all of you running out to get the canon i960 if you are only going to use the printer to print photos. i agree, epson is still not as good as the canon and hp when it comes to printing text and other color documents. but for photos, i think epson is still the best option, especially now epson r200 is only $99, and it uses the same print engine and inks as the epson r300 except it doesn't have the useless built-in media readers and viewer.