Many thanks to all of you who have responded to my plea and jumped into the discussion with some very valuable advice and comments. I would agree wholeheartedly with those who say Photoshop is overkill for 99.9% of us interested in plant digital photography, myself included. I really do only scratch the surface, although purchase on Saturday of the book 'Photoshop for Dummies' should help me go deeper. For example, I haven't done it yet but shall start using it do get rid of annoying labels in images that I didn't have time to physically remove or never noticed when shooting. I have Photoshop for reasons other than because I have the dollars or am a photo editing pro - I was the lucky recipient of a gift of it (legally and licensed of course !). I would be in big trouble though without the batch process facility as I use this to automate every process - buy a program with this if you can. One of the huge advantages of digital photography that mark M brought out should be emphasized. You can shoot the equivalent of a roll of slide film very quickly on each and every subject to get that one image that you can use for slides, web and print - at effectively no cost in time or money, once you've made the original capital outlay. With respect to printers that have flash card slots, or readers, built in. I advised a friend a few weeks ago who wanted a good new printer not to go this route simply because a lot of extra dollars have gone into non-print related features that I'm unsure of the utility of. In addition to the card reader there are a variety of buttons and an LCD screen. You always need to do something to the image before printing, hence my recommendation to go down the separate card reader route. Incidentally, on that note, SanDisk have now just brought out a reader than reads 6 different cards, flash, secure digital etc) and is USB2.0 format - i.e. 40 times faster than standard USB - all for $45. To my mind this is the best way to go - and your photo transfer from camera to computer is lightning fast and independent of other hardware and/or software. Mark - does the card reader on a printer allow transfer to the computer or just to the printer ? Mark M also brought up TIF vs. JPG choices for saving images and is quite right that an uncompressed TIF file is higher quality than a high quality JPG. There is an issue though with taking all your images in TIF format, as I found out ! If I set my 995 to capture 2048 x 1536 TIF files it takes over 20s to save the image to the flash card memory, and I use a SanDisk Ultra card which does this 2-3 times faster than a standard flash card. This is unbelievably frustrating ! You also end up with a file that is 9Mb in size so it takes longer to move around. I did a comparison between TIF and the best JPG format offered, which has minimal compression, and to all intents and purposes the results are indistinguishable until the image is blown up to huge proportions. I concluded that for my needs the high quality JPG worked best because the quality was still superb, I could capture the image in 2 seconds and the file was only 1-2Mb in size. With respect to compression - the images you see on my web site have been compressed to 40% of their original quality. I concur wholly with Mark and Tony's comments on the quality and utility of the Nikon Coolpix 99x range for close-up macro photography. It can still be frustrating occasionally to capture very thin subjects close up by you can get there by fooling the camera. A trick I use is to shove the lends right up against the subject (too close), so that it 'realizes' that it is looking at something really close-up, then back off whilst the autofocus is seeking the focus. This usually results in it finding the subject rather than the background ! This is wonderful topic and I say again - please keep the comments flowing ! J. PS. For those looking for that last stocking filler (Mark - you wife hinted to me that she'd love a digital camera that she would let you use occasionally) I looked at prices on the web last night and the Coolpix 995 can be had for around $420. Dr John T Lonsdale 407 Edgewood Drive, Exton, Pennsylvania 19341, USA Phone 610 594 9232 Fax 801 327 1266 Visit "Edgewood" - The Lonsdale Garden at http//http://www.johnlonsdale.net/ Zone 6b