recommend decent photo printer

I have an IMAC OS verson 10.6.5. My printer is a Canon Pixma MP 610. I do my photo editing (I"m still a rookie) in Adobe Photoshop Elements and save the edited photos in iPHOTO. When I print photos, however, I never seem to get the contrast or color saturation that I see when I review my photos in iPHOTO. Can anyone recommend an appropriate, not too expensive printer which will allow me to print higher quality photos? Thanks.

I have a Canon Pixma MP620 and just used it the other day to print some family photos for hanging up around the house.
One thing I noticed is when printing from iPhoto you have limited printing preferences options. If I make a copy of the photo into a folder in Finder (or on the Desktop) then open it in Preview and print the photo from there, I get ALL of the Canon printer driver options. I can make the print quality higher and choose vivid photo, contrast settings, etc. etc. I'd at least try doing that first if I was you before looking into buying a whole new printer. Might just be as simple as that. Maybe...

Pixma printing

Thanks - I'll try that first!

If you did color corrections and stuff print from within Adobe Elements. The colors will print closer to what you did than iPhoto ever will.

Try what the guys suggested first. I would never have thought of that since I don't print out of iPhoto. If making adjustments with the additional printing features still doesn't yield good results, try running the color calibration routine (Displays Preference Pane on the Color tab). It helped me get the monitor and an Epson printer in better sync. It is not as good as a dedicated profiling program but good enough for most uses. I can also say from experience that the paper used can also significantly affect the printout.