Try Print Pal, I've used others and have been happy with cartridges. But I save the most by buying "bulk ink" and refilling cartridges two or three times before replacing. If you're doing only photo, you can do the self service at places like Walmart for under 30 cents each, don't remember the exact number. Your numbers about say 35 Cents just for ink with the Vivera set, maybe more with the Canon. To this you have to add the cost of the paper, what another 50 cents per picture? Of course you save on the gas if printing your own actually saves a trip. My Lexmark X8300 series AIO printer has smaller, lower cost cartridges than most other Lexmarks, I like that because the print head is in the cartridge and when it wears out (from refills) it cost less to get a new set of print heads.

Yes, you can use a digital camera to convert slides to digital files. It depends on what accessories your camera manufacturer offers. A few years ago when Nikon was selling their 900 series, they also offered a slide conversion kit. The camera mounted to the kit and the kit had a backlight to illuminate the slides. The slides would be saved to whatever format the camera supported, and at camera supported resolution. I have a cousin who at one time did commerical photography for advertisments. He had shots from around the world at exotic locations - including models. He convertered about 3000 slides using his Nikon. So, it depends on what accessories are offered. A fast way to transfer the photos to disk or other storage media is to insert a large capacity memory card into the camera, say 1 GB or more and shoot away. When the card is full, pull the card and place into a card reader and copy the photos to the storage media of your choice. While you at the task, it is advisable to check you work. Review the slides before copying to permanent media to see if adjustments in exposure, etc. are needed. The copy process will faithfully copy dirt and scratches as well. If you have MicroSoft Office 2000 or other, you may have a viewer hidden away. To find this viewer, got to Programs> Microsoft Office Tools > MicroSoft Photo Editor. It's not a full featured editor, but what it does, it does well, and works great for reviewing. A caveat: While the camera memory card is in the reader, do not perform any operation that writes back to the camera card other than simple deletion. Each camera manufacturer has their own propertiary formatting scheme, and that can be fouled if you perform a "write" to the card with anything else except the camera. Storage Media: You should give some thought to the choice of final storage media. For example, 10 years later, will equipemnt be available to read the media? How permanent is the media? Maybe it would be wise to set up a calendar to remind yo to copy the media every 5 years or so. I do not advise depending on thumb drives, although these have improved greatly over the past 5 years. Thunb drives are great for temporary storage, but these do have a limited life. Each junction can withstand about 10,000 rewrites before these fail. Memroy cards these days employ 'leveling' schemes to level out the wear over the entire card, not just the front end of the card. This scheme has improved life by a goodly factor, but someday, a jucntion will eventually fail and that file will be damaged. If the damage occurs in the directory, the entire card may be lost. I am not privy to the internals of today's cards, but in the beginning, these cards had an internal, keep-alive battery that was good for about 10 years. I have been tussling with this storage problem and do not have a satisfactory solution for long term storage of sensitive documents. The best that I have at the moment is external hard drives and CDs and DVDs. Nothing yet matches the old time technology of well processed photos. For example, I have several dagurreotypes (tin types) from which I have made acceptable copies. These images were over 150 years old. I also have photos that are over 100 years old that have proven useful in my genealogical research. So far, digital storage can not match this record.

I do have both disks. As to your question about did I use the 960C disk when I installed the printer, my grandson who is computer savy having worked for a computer firm has since moved to Qatar boardering Saudi Arabia installed my new system when he was home for a short visit. I have since read that Windows 7 recognizes all printers unlike other operating systems so I suspect that is what happened rather than using the disk. But I am willing to try anything to be able to see the level of ink in the 960. Myra

I have owned three Epsons and while they were superior to the print output of an HP I was able to try at home, I too noticed the ink dries quickly in them if you don't print often. I also found they were not very intuitive setting up for printing on 4"x6" photo paper. That may have changed/improved since I used my Epson (7+ years ago) but I still want to avoid one because of the ink issue. I'm going to do some comparisons with Canon and HP printers today and make a decision soon I hope. I am in the process of (re)starting my own home-based design business again. I had it for eight years before accepting an offer I couldn't refuse from a high tech company 7 years ago. I left them in September 2012 and wanted to get my travel to Southeast Asia out of the way before I got serious about going back to work.