Please be more specific on what you are going to use the printer and scanner for, you then might get some good feed back. For example are you using the equipment as a hobbiest, semi-pro, a pro in a studio? Are you doing large scale scanning? Scanning flat work photos, or nega and trans? etc. Are you using it for home etc? All this would then provide a base on which people could give good recommendations.
Susan,
Your candidates are all very good for the money. For a printer, you might want to choose a model that can print larger when you want to, such as the Canon i9100 ($499) which can print up to 13" x 19" borderless prints, or the Epson 2200, which can also do 13" x 19", large panoramas on roll paper, and many smaller sizes and uses permanent pigment inks.
The Epson R800 can also print directly to printable CDs and DVDs, which can be handy if you have a CD burner or DVD burner.
You didn’t say whether you will need to scan some slides, but I would personally be very tempted by the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo ($449) flatbed color image scanner. It has a resolution of 4800 x 9600 dpi, a maximum scan size of 8.5" x 11.7", a built-in 6" x 9" transparency adapter, 3.8 Dmax optical density, can scan in 48-bit color or 16-bit grayscale, has both FireWire and USB 2.0 interfaces, comes with Digital ICE and Easy Photo Fix technology, and its bundled software includes Epson Scan, Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, ABBYY FineReader Sprint OCR and LaserSoft SilverFast SE 6. It could do a very credible job scanning both prints and slides and is attractive to me because I have a lot of stereo slides that don’t fit well in most dedicated slide/film scanners.
— Burton —
