Professional Digital PrintsProfessional Digital PrintsEven though we can view our digital images as slide shows and breathtaking on-screen presentations, it's still a great thrill to see our brilliant photographs reproduced as a high-quality, professional digital prints. Creating high quality digital prints is really easy, when you leave it to the professionals. Here we look at having your digital photos printed by someone else. There are a wide variety of options when it comes to having your prized digital photos reproduced as professional digital prints - or hard copy prints, as they're sometimes called. Some people find printing their photos at home too time consuming and a bit of a hassle. It can also be quite expensive if you like to print out every single digital photo, although there are ways around this, which we will discuss a little later. Many high-street photo stores have now included digital printing to their list of services and offer a couple of options. Digital Photo Kiosk Fast and easy...The simplest, and quickest, method of producing digital photo prints is with the photo "Kiosk" service. Kiosks come in all shapes and sizes but essentially they are stand-alone printing machines. They incorporate a touch sensitive monitor which you use to choose the appropriate style and quantity of prints. There's sometimes a credit card slot for instant payment. You can zap your cellphone images straight into your friendly local photo kiosk or download images from your digital memory card. The kiosk walks you through a step by step process using on-screen prompts and within a few minutes you're the proud owner of a set of 6"x4" digital photo prints. This is great if you need an instant set of digital photo prints to share with someone else, on the spot. CD friendly... If a friend sends you a CD full of images. You can simply load the disc into the kiosk, choose only the images you want to have printed and press enter...in a few moments you're done! It's also possible to perform simple photo editing on-screen, such as cropping and eliminating red-eye, although these operations are quite limited and are really best performed on your PC. It can be most annoying for other kiosk customers if they're forced to wait around for 20 minutes while you customize every image before you print it out. It's much easier, and far more considerate to other kiosk users, to adjust your photos at home, drop the desired digital photo prints onto CD ready to output quickly and easily at the kiosk. One advantage of photo kiosks is that some allow you to save images from your camera onto CD whether or not you wish to print them out. This means that if you are on vacation and you want to securely save the images from your memory card, you can burn them onto CD via the kiosk, then go ahead and reuse the memory card. The Pros and Cons... All this instant convenience does make the one-hour film process seem a bit lame, but as with everything, there are pros and cons. Kiosk produced digital photo prints are usually made using a thermal ink method of printing, which uses less robust print material and tends to be of inferior quality to the traditional silver halide prints of old. Digital photo kiosks are very convenient and good fun when you just need a quick set of prints to share with friends there and then, but the results are not always the best quality. Return from Professional Digital Prints to Easy Tips Home Page
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