Some of you may have seen this one coming.

Now that I've got this wonderful new digital camera, I'm itching for a really good photo printer. I am going to take my time and carefully research this over the next few months, so there's no rush. But I'd like the opinions of the people on this BBS.

Our current 720-dpi Epson 440 is nice. It was very inexpensive, its ink cartridges are easy to find, and it's been reasonably reliable. When printing on photo paper at its finest setting, it delivers rich, solid colors and the results are very film-like.

Except for the 720-dpi part, that is. When your eyes get closer than about 12 inches from the page, you can see the stochastic dither pattern of the dots. I just printed a pathological worst-case-scenario picture of my mother-in-law standing in the snow with a white dog. The darkly-colored portions of the photo looked fine, but the areas of subtle shadows on the surface of the snow were terrible, with widely spaced and very obvious dither-dots.

So now I'm wondering "what's out there" in printing technology now. Last I looked at color printers (years ago), the closest you could get to "no dots" was teribly expensive dye-sublimation processes which delivered true gradations of color.

So who can give me advice in this area? I'm looking for something that will:

- Print on 8.5x11" paper. I want to print large portrait-sized photos, not tiny little things for a photo album. This rules out those consumer-targeted "photo printers" that plug straight into your camera.

- Print without showing noticeable dot patterns.

- Deliver solid, film-like color on glossy photo paper.

- Have a reasonable (not necessarily "cheap") cost-per-page.

- Have reasonably color-fast inks. In other words, I don't want the reds to fade into pink after a year. (The epson 440 seems to be pretty good about this.)

- Be priced in the consumer range, not the graphic-arts-house range.

Anyone have any advice? My next stop is www.dpreview.com to see if they review photo printers as well as cameras.