Okay, I got my i960 last night. I haven't done a whole lot of printing with it, but so far it's fantastic. The 4x6's truly are indistinguishable from film, and it's quite fast. It'll do a borderless 4x6 in highest quality mode in about 30-40 seconds, which may not sound that fast but certainly much faster than any printer I've had before. It even has very good quality on plain paper - not photo quality of course, but realistic tones considering the media.
I also like the software bundle, which I usually don't even install. It puts a button on the toolbar for Easy Web Print, which fits a web page onto the paper, eliminating the annoyance of losing the right margin of documents on many websites. In addition, it will print white text on black background websites, which my other printers couldn't handle. The Photo Print software allows you to easily select one or more photos off your hard disk, then print them as 4x6's, 5x7's, 8x10's, wallets, index, etc on the paper, fitting everything appropriately. It kinda eliminates some of the hassles with many printer drivers.
I researched a lot before I bought this printer, and could barely find any negative impressions of either the 860 or 960. I ended up going with the 960, but I believe I would have been very happy with either. For $116 after GC, the 860 is a fantastic deal. If you can swing a few more bucks for the 960, I don't believe you will be disappointed.
One thing I found humorous about one of the reviews I read - the reviewer claimed the Canon ink was more expensive than the HP ink. While it's true that to fully replace all ink cartridges on the 960 will cost $66 (6 colors, $11 each) versus $45 or whatever for the HP, you will end up with 3x as much ink in total, and will not have to throw away the whole cartridge if one color runs out. It seemed like a very shortsighted opinion, because in the long run the Canon ink is much, much cheaper.
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