With the popularity of digital cameras, more and more people are taking more and more photographs. In fact despite scare-mongering stories about "the end of history" and "the death of photography", the truth is that there are more photos being taken today than ever before. However most of those photos will never be seen by anyone except the person who took them, because hardly anyone prints their photos any more. This is very odd, because many people have home computers with photo-quality printers that are more than capable of producing first-class prints from almost any digital photograph. Printers are ludicrously cheap, to the point that when your printer runs out of ink it's almost cheaper to throw it away and buy a new one than it is to buy more ink.
Types of printer
There are two main types of photo printer in common home use. By far the most common is the inkjet printer, which includes most of the models from most of the major manufacturers, which basically means Epson, Canon, Lexmark and Hewlett Packard (Dell printers are made by Lexmark). They operate off a fairly simple principle. The printer has a head which moves rapidly over the surface of the paper. In this head are a number of tiny nozzles, through which minute droplets of ink are forced, spraying onto the paper in tiny but precisely measured quantities, as many as 30,000 droplets per second. The actual method by which the ink is forced out of the nozzles varies from one manufacturer to another, with Canon, HP and Lexmark favouring a thermal system which boils the ink at the print head, using the bursting bubbles to spray the ink (hence Canon’s BubbleJet name), while Epson uses a more complex and expensive but also more versatile piezo-electric compression system. ..."
