Three ways to print your digital photographs

A few tips for those of you who feel photographs are still best treasured as four-by-six hard copy prints


So you got a digital camera and it's been fun just snapping away. Maybe you've even figured out how to get the pictures on your computer. But what's the best way to get them out of the machine as 4-by-6 prints? You've got three basic choices: Use a colour inkjet printer at home, take the camera to a digital-printing kiosk at a store or upload the pictures to a photo-finishing website that will mail prints to you.

Home printing can be the most convenient choice. Some photo-quality inkjet printers even bypass the computer – just plug in your camera's memory card and select prints using the printer's controls.

Epson's Stylus Photo 825, a colour inkjet, is capable of printing enlargements up to 8 by 10 inches at a resolution of 5,760 by 720 dots per inch, and Hewlett Packard's more specialised Photosmart 230, makes only 4-by-6 prints but delivers a resolution of 4,800 by 1,200 dpi and includes a 1.8-inch colour screen for inspecting and lightly editing images (cropping and brightness adjustments are as far as you can go). Both printers support Digital Print Order Format, which is used to designate which photos to print from a digital camera.

The second-fastest way to get prints from a digital camera is to use print kiosks. Prints, on Fujicolor Crystal Archive paper, takes less than a minute each and looks excellent, if a little dark.

The third option is to upload pictures to a photo-finishing site. Each of five sites we tested offered proprietary uploading software but also allowed uploads via a web browser. You can also do the same basic editing online as at a printing kiosk. Even over a broadband connection, however, uploading more than 10 or so gets tedious. EZ Prints (www.ezprints.com) and Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.com) did best, delivering clear, colourful prints on Fuji Crystal Archive paper. Prints from Kodak's Ofoto (www.ofoto.com) looked only a shade darker on Kodak Duralife paper. Picturetrail (www.picturetrail.com) and Snapfish (www.snapfish.com) used regular Kodak paper, with output just slightly too pale.

Which method is best? If you need prints of dozens of shots, the photo kiosk is the fastest.

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