I remember the shock I felt when I put a sheet of glossy into my old
Epson 640 - I realised that digtial imaging had truly come of age that
day!  But then after some years and driving my beloved Epson 1270 into
the ground, I'm a bit over the ink costs...  So back to the printing
labs..  (O:

My method involves very gentle use of a microfibre cloth and a funny
little antistatic gun from my days playing with hi-fi's and vinyl lps,
etc.  But no that technique doesn't work either.  But I've got to be
preety fast at cloning, I can pretty much do it with one hand while
doing something else.

Thanks.  It's probably my favorite.

Speaking of dad's, mine (now long gone) told me that HH couldn't paint
animal faces, because had I noticed that always the cattle/horses are
facing away in his paintings..?  I must go look at an HH gallery to see
if he was just having me on..

You're sort of right, I must admit that I was thinking about tests I did
on print film, not slide, and the grain-aliasing was a limiting issue.
On K25's, you should get 'reasonable' 11 x 8's.  Do you have a DSLR to
compare them with, just out of interest?  We could re-ignite some old
arguments about the 'equivalence' of film scans and digital...

And the problem with drum scanners is that roughly 1 in 10 of the drum
scanning services is run by anyone who actually knows what they are doing...

Ah, you noticed I avoided that bit.. Dang.  It's because i don't really
have an answer.  Although I think that the price of poratbale HD storage
is now so reasonable it is hard not to go down that path, perhaps with
(good quality) DVD's as backup.

My rather crappy approach is to simply keep the best shots always on my
main hard drive, and then to progressively archive the remaining keepers
to DVD.  I have two drums of different brand DVD's, and make two copies
to be sure, to be sure.

Maybe one day punched card will be good enough, but right now, it's just
too new a technology..

Having been bitten twice - once by a rapid and nasty hard drive failure,
and another time from a CD failure, and losing in total about a hundred
or so digital images (including about ten or so that really hurt), I now
keep two copies of everything.  Every six months or so I do a quick, but
thorough check - to see all files on each DVD are readable.

I don't have a huge collection (I'm not that good!), so it is pretty
easy to manage.

I too have seen many, many images from my family's archives that have
simply been lost, or degraded terribly over the years (can you say
ektachrome/agfa/konica slides...), plus lost negatives, yellow prints
fungus, etc.  Digital has it's problems, but at last if you know what
you are doing, you *can* keep perfect copies indefinitely.  Whether
'can' translates to 'do', is another matter.

Exactly.  But I have to say it's probably just as well that a lot of the
digital images will be lost as time goes by, because people (myself
included) do keep a lot of crap... (O:

Hopefully the good'uns will attract a little extra care..

I knew you were a bloke with impeccable taste - my favorite show!!!
Thanks for the reminder and I'm off too!

What you did wrong was mistake PPI (Pixels Per Inch) for DPI
(Dots Per Inch). All of the inkjet manufacturers make their
claim in DPI, but pretty rare to find a PPI rating for any
of them. There is a difference because of the way they
print. When a printer puts a dot on paper it is either there
or not there, they can't control the density of the ink they
put out. So each dot either has 100% ink or no ink. If we
expand it to a CMY process, each dot can have one of 7
colours - a long way from the 16 million shades a JPG can
contain.  To create different shades, they have to use a
group of dots, some of which are on, and some are off.
Because of the number of dots needed to create a wide range
of shades, the minimum size of a pixel is much larger than
the size of a dot - or IOW the PPI is a much lower figure
than the DPI.
Note that the above is a simplification - in practice dots
are overlaid on each other as well, further complicating
things. Suffice to say that a 4800dpi printer has dots that
are significantly larger than 1/4800".
I'm not aware of any inkjet printer manufacturer that
advertises what the achievable PPI is, but I would be
surprised if any are able to achieve significantly higher
than 300PPI.
What is true about the high DPI printers is their colour
accuracy and fine colour contrast increases. Their
achievable PPI may not be significantly higher, but the
improved colour rendition will still be a benefit. This is
most easily observed in areas of pale colour - the older
printers would have clearly visible dots, whereas the newer
high resolution printers can achieve subtle pale colours.

Because of this method of dot based printing, it is not
meaninful to directly compare the DPI of different printing
technologies. Photographic printers (such as the Fuji
Frontier), or Dye-Sub printers (such as the Kodak printer
docks) usually have a print resolution of 300 DPI. The
difference here is that every one of those dots can have an
infinitely variable density, so they only need one dot to
make one pixel. This is why a 300DPI frontier print will
look pretty much identical to a 4800dpi Canon or Epson print.
<snip>

It's finished so I'm back, although only half here cos gruen
transfer is on.