Pat - I am at a similar decision point regarding the 1200 and 3000. I can tell you the 3000 does show a definite dot in some light and transition areas on photographic paper. The dot is quite noticeable to me but I am picky. You do not see the same dot on the 1200 but then 1200 is somewhat less crisp than the 3000. Perhaps another drawback of the 3000 is its size... huge. But I am sold on the large individual ink tanks of the 3000 and the availability of archival inks. The 1200's one tank system is rather wasteful and expensive by comparison. Can you tell me more about the "muddy green" problem... is that the inks or the paper? So at this moment I am pretty much convinced the 3000 is the way to go. I can only imagine I will be replacing it in another 12-18 months by something better. I too am on a Mac... with 400 MB of RAM. I am sure the 128MB you have will be fine for printing but any image manipulation would benefit from more. Also, I am sure you have seen the dialogue over CDR drives. I have one and couldn't imaginee using anything else for archiving my photos. mike - Please: Stay on topic. Trim quoted messages. http://www.leben.com/lists for list instructions.