Photo printers are great to have. They can be your very own digital darkroom.

Glossy photo paper can allow you to make very nice looking prints from your digital photos. You can put the sheets of paper into your ink jet printer and then print out the photograph and they look very similar to regular photographic prints.

Keep in mind that you can also have your digital photographs printed at many regular photo printers. All you need to do is to put your photograph onto a disk or if you have a lot of photographs you can put them onto a CD with your own CD burner. You can even edit your digital photos in Photoshop, and they will still be able to output them as regular prints, the same kind you are used to getting with your film camera. There are also a number of online photo processors as well. A wide variety of photo printers are available today. Among the options available are these:

Dye Sublimation Printers

The dye sublimation process involves the use of a ribbon that contains the printing colors which when heated are transferred to paper with great accuracy.

Inkjet Printers

Inkjet printers spray ink onto the paper in small dots. This process does not produce the true color of dye sublimation. However, the process is getting better all the time and is less expensive. If you use special photo paper, you will find the results of good inkjet printers to be very satisfying.

Color Laser Printers

A color laser printer will be more expensive to purchase initially. However, if you make lots of color prints, the operating costs will be cheaper for the laser printer in the long run. A laser printer works by using a laser beam to generate an image, which is created on the paper by transferring toner using an electric charge.

No matter what type of printer you decide to buy, you will want to consider a couple nice extra features.

An extra USB port on your printer is very handy. With this port you can connect your camera directly to your printer. No need to get your computer involved when you just want to print a photo or two!

Another great printer feature is a memory card slot. With this feature, you can take the memory card out of your camera and put it directly into your printer. Then you can printer directly from the memory card.