What goes best with a digital photo camera? Why, a photo printer of course, preferably one that is small in size and offers high quality prints that you can share with your friends and family. Like in the case of any other product, when buying a photo printer there are several technologies and products you can choose from. There are two types of photo printers that are relevant at this point : inkjet vs dye-sublimation photo printers.

Siemens was responsible for the first inkjet printing device that hit the market in 1951. The continuous inkjet printer technology was perfected and introduced later by IBM, around 1970. But while the inkjet printer has been around for many many years, it wasn't until much later that people actually considered using it for printing photos, and not just text. At this time, inkjet printers are the most common and used printers on the market. But how do they work? Well, what basically happens is that the printer doses very small 'bubbles' of ink onto a paper sheet to create text or an image.

There are two main inkjet technologies that manufacturers are using in today's devices. The first, thermal bubble (also known as bubble jet) is most frequently used by the two well known printer manufacturers, Canon and HP. It uses tiny resistors to create heat. The heat vaporizez ink and really small bubbles are created. The ink bubble then starts expanding and the ink is pushed out of a nozzle straight onto the sheet of paper. The second type of technology is know as piezoelectric. It uses piezo crystals (one crystal at the back of each nozzle) which receives a tiny electric charge. It starts to vibrate inward and pushes a very small amount of ink. Both these technologies work just fine for printing out text, images, and with the help of special photo paper, even decent quality photos.

Dye sublimation printing was invented to provide photo lab quality pictures at home.What didn't make them very popular in the beginning was the extremely high price of the devices. But the more prices go down, more digital camera owners are choosing this technology over inkjet, that quite frankly can't compare as quality. Compared to inkjet, in dye sublimation printing colors aren't just pushed to the paper sheet as individual dots. Featuring a roll of transparent film there are solid dyes that correspond to the four main colors used in printing (CMYB – cyan, magenta, yellow, black). As the print head passes over the film, it heats up and causes those dyes to vaporize. The dye never goes through liquid stage, it turns straight from solid to gas. When the ink turns into gas, it diffuses onto the photo paper and solidifies. This means no small specks of ink to be seen (like in the case of inkjet). Hence, photos look more realistic and lab-quality-like.

Both the inkjet and the dye-sublimation technologies weren't readily available to the home user. In the beginning inkjet was mainly used for text, while dye-sublimation printers were limited to high-end commercial printing (due to the high costs involved). Nowadays, both printer types can be found around the $100 price tag. In an inkjet vs dye-sublimation photo printers race, if a consumer needs the device strictly for printing photos, then the dye-sublimation one should win, quality-wise. But if you need an office printer to handle all your reports and paperwork as well, inkjet is worth considering.