Your Printer Team

Types of Photo Printers
By Jason Gluckman

Photo printers are printers capable of printing images with or without a computer. Photo printers became popular with the coming of digital cameras. The major types of photo printers are ink-jet photo printers and the dye-sublimation photo printers.

Inkjet photo printer takes print by spraying dye-based or pigmented ink through a series of nozzles onto the photo paper. To produce high quality photos, some innovative inkjet photo printer manufacturers have come with additional colors such as light cyan and light magenta. With a resolution of 2880 dpi, most of the inkjet photo printers can produce sharp and pattern free photo prints.

HP, Canon, Kodak, and Epson are some of the famous brands of inkjet photo printers. Canon Pixma iP4000 and Epson Picture Mate are the most commonly used models of inkjet photo printers. On an average, a top quality inkjet photo printer will cost more than $150.

Dye sublimation printers, better known as dye-sub printers and thermal-dye printers, are the most popular photo printers after inkjet photo printers. In a dye-sublimation photo printer, the CMYK color ribbon is heated and the color is transferred to photo paper. The CMYK color scale includes cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Dye sublimation photo printers have higher resolution than inkjet photo printers, and can create clear and high quality photos. When compared with inkjet photo printers, the dye sublimation photo printers are much faster. A good quality dye-sublimation photo printer will cost more than $150. Canon, Kodak, and Olympus are some of the popular brands of dye sublimation photo printers.

Other than ink-jet and dye-sublimation photo printers, laser photo printers and Fuji film PG-series are the commonly used types of photo printers. The Fuji film PG-series includes Fuji film’s PG3500 and PG4000-II printers. These photo printers use a special type of dye-transfer process, which gives the photograph the look of traditional color prints.