Inkjet printers are still the most widely used printer technology in homes, home offices and small businesses. There are basically two types of inkjet printers: all-purpose and photo quality.

Most moderate to high priced all purpose inkjet printers excel at producing sharp, crisp looking black text. Though not specifically designed for photo printing, many find the resulting prints of photos to be satisfactory.

For lab-quality prints, a photo inkjet printer is a must. They provide outstanding quality and most make borderless prints.  The more color and varying shades of black ink cartridges a printer uses, the more true-to-life images it will produce.

Photo printers that use individual ink cartridges save money because you don’t need to buy an entire multi-color cartridge when a color runs out, only a tank for a specific color. If you want to print directly from your camera, bypassing a computer altogether, both camera and printer must be PictBridge compatible.

Printer driver

During installation of camera software, a printer driver is installed on your computer and is accessed in the “print” menu. Use the “properties” menu to select paper type, print quality, page orientation and size, special effects and other print options.

The driver also provides access to settings for power options as well as general maintenance such as cleaning printer nozzles and aligning the print head.

Most print drivers warn when the level of ink is getting low. The printer will automatically stop when an ink cartridge is empty. You won’t be able to resume printing until a new cartridge is inserted. This is a good reason to keep extra ink tanks or cartridges on hand.