Unlike traditional film photography, with digital cameras you don’t automatically get a set of photo prints. Typically you take your camera home and download your images onto a computer, then you can scroll through the files and see what you shot that day. From there you can store them on your PC, perhaps catalogued in a software application or even on line at one of the many on-line photo album sites. All this is great, and todays technology is allowing us to do some amazing things, but what if you want to print your pictures to a hard copy?
There are several technologies available for printing your images. Most are accessible to the home photographer and some are cost prohibitive.

Ink Jet printers

Ink Jet is probably the most common kind of print technology used for printing photos at home. The printers are very cheap to buy and they are simple to operate. They work by spraying tiny drops of ink onto the paper to form an image. They are easily affordable for home use and often come bundled with your new computer. Prices start from well under a hundred dollars and range up to $1600 or more depending on the model.
The higher end models offer better colour matching and higher print resolutions giving superior results. Also the better ink jet printers use more thank the usual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black ink cartridges often adding Light Magenta or Light Cyan and others. These additional colours allow for better reproduction of things like skin tones and more difficult colour blends.
In most ink jet printers it is possible to change individual ink cartridges when the colour runs out. This will save you money as you won’t be wasting ink by replacing all the colours in one go.
Ink Jet printers give good results especially when you use high quality matte or glossy ink jet photo paper. Manufacturers often product their own range of papers to compliment their printers.

Dye Sublimation

Dye sublimation is a process of transfering colour dye from a celophane sheet to the paper to produce the image. The sheet is moved over the image area and tiny heaters on the print head produce varying intensities of heat to manage how much colour is transfered. The process is repeated for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black.
Dye sublimation printers usually only offer the equivalent of a 10 x 6 photo print and can be expensive to run as the any colour not used on a cellophane sheet is wasted. Colour sheets cannot be reused.
This is the same print technology you would find in a typical photo kiosk booth.

Laser Printing

Colour laser printers are more usually found in design studios and are more typically used for pre press proofs. Whilst the prices have come down considerably over recent years they are still not widely used in the home environment. Possibly due to the cost but perhaps also because of the limited media choice available.
Laser printers transfer toner onto the paper which is then baked onto the page by at fuser in a similar way to a photocopier would.

Silver Halide

This method of printing will reproduce your digital images to be virtually indistinguishable from a photographic print using a traditional film camera. You cannot use these printers at home so you would have to visit the local One Hour photo lab.
The digital images are processed through the colour development cycle and are treated exactly like a roll of film. The results are high quality, durable and very affordable. This processes is more suited to those times when you have a large number of images to develop and you can simply take them all in on a CD