Digital SLR Cameras & Photography For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Hard Copies Aren't Hard

In This Chapter

• Someday, your prints will come

• Output options

• Choosing your printer

Years ago, some wise futurists predicted that digital photography would spell the end of photographic prints, just as the advent of word processing, fax machines, text messaging, and e-mail would cause the Post Office to close its doors, overnight delivery services to go bankrupt, and manufacturers of file cabinets to switch to more profitable products, such as personal aero-planes. If you believed these folks, you'd think that the paperless office would lead to the print-less home, and everyone would be doing their reading and photo viewing on computer monitors, TV sets, or cell phones.

People are doing much of their reading and photo viewing on those devices — especially cell phones. Okay, so the predictions weren't totally bogus. But even so, modern society still creates tons of prints today because you can make those prints more easily than ever before at home or in the office, upload digital files to your local mega-mart for one-hour printing, or stop by a retailer's handy kiosk to custom-print hard copies for about the same cost as those automated machine prints you could get from film back in the photography Dark Ages.

Even in an age when many people are snapping photos with their cell phones and uploading them directly to their Facebook pages, then sending tweets ...