Digital Camera Printers

O.K. You've been clicking away merrily and hopefully creatively for the day and produced hundreds of marvellous photographs with your digital camera. What's next then? The next step is to turn these ‘virtual’ images into real photos. One way is to send the memory card to a digital photo laboratory and get the images developed there. But if you click digital photos on a regular basis, then eventually you will want to buy yourself a digital printer, or more commonly known as a digital photo printer.

There are lots and lots of choices available in the market today. The top three companies are HP, Canon and Epson. So, before you go and spend your money, here are some tips on what you must keep in mind while deciding on a digital photo printer.

Firstly, digital photo printers are available in two types. There are basic 4-colour printers and more advanced printers with more colours. The cheaper printers have all colours in one cartridge, whilst the better printers have one cartridge per colour.The greater the number of colours the higher quality you can expect when you hit the print button. . If you have multiple inks in one cartridge then you have to replace the entire cartridge even if only one colour runs out.. Hence, it is more expensive to replace such cartridges and you waste a lot of ink as well. Using good quality photo paper and one of the higher range printers will give you results that rival your photo lab.

There has been a great improvement in how long it takes for a print to fade, and digital prints now are as archival as traditional prints. The main problem is in the price of the ink cartridges. If you are just printing for yourself ie. not to sell I would advise that experimenting with inks that are produced not by the printer manufacturer but by independent ink makers might be the way to go.

If you want to print really great looking black-and-white images, then the printer needs to have grey inks as well. So, an 8-color printer would be best suited for this purpose.

The ability of the printer to print directly from your camera or a memory card through a link is a function that a lot of photographers look for.

If you are after a first class photograph the printers speed can go up to 10 minutes so you must properly check this out depending upon our usage.

All in one machines with combined printer and scanner are being developed and are great great for a busy office or household but if you want to make fine prints out of your digital images you should invest in a dedicated digital digital photo printer. Look for models that will take the most popular memory cards straight into the printer without having to load the images into your computer.