Thanks Shakirov - that's what I had tried in my original post but it can cause other problems with printers that have a clear ink cartridge - the clear coat can end up in odd places outside the photo area.

I think exporting to PDF may be the way to go. Interesting point, mwenz, about the resolution - I try to aim for 720dpi when printing to the Epson 3800 or 7880 as it appears to be their native resolution when printing at 1440/2880 dpi.

For straight image to paper jobs, Qimage is great for large prints and can apply sharpening to the image at the native printer resolution before it gets sent to the printer, giving the image that little edge. However, as soon as I want to add anything to the print such as text etc, I'm reaching for Xara. It's a shame Xara limits its own bitmap output to 600dpi and in print I think the print-time rescaling to 720 dpi is going to be non optimal.

I even tried Drawplus and PagePlus but both of them have a 64 Mpixel limit!

The next time I print, I'll go the PDF route to see how I get on.

Albacore, you raise an interesting question in my mind - from a colour accuracy stance, does Xara correctly handle colour profiles in photos... My printouts look spot on but they are in sRGB with the printer handling the paper colour profile. If I used Adobe RGB I wonder if things would go awry.

Printing... it can get so very complex!