A good printer for printing 4 x 6 inch prints from your digital camera is the compact photo printer. This printer works without having to be connected to a computer. It is often called a portable photo printer or a snapshot printer. The advent of this printer became popular in 2000 when people were getting interested in printing their photos at home. This was the answer to either printing them on a printer or the type of cameras that developed their own pictures.
The compact photo printer is a small printer with a big LCD screen for choosing the photos you want to save. There are editing options that allow you to do more than you would think including cropping, adjusting the color and reducing red eye just to name a few. They also have a USB connection, memory card format and many other options.
There are compact photo printers that are fully portable. They can be used with an electrical outlet or a battery that you can use to take it with you wherever you go. The ease of the controls is another feature that makes this printer such a well liked printer. The memory card can be plugged in, you use the touch screen to peruse through the photos and use your options to fix anything that may need adjusting and print.
This printer works with dye sublimation, which is a process of printing using heat to transfer the dye to the paper. This usually involves putting one color at a time. The printer uses a cyan, magenta, yellow, and an overcoat (CMYO) rather than the CMYK. This overcoat is used to protect the photo from UV light which often makes photos discolor. The added protection of being water resistant is another feature of using this combination. This saves money on ink and the dark colors are made by using the three colors combined.
Using the CMYK colors for printing, the compact photo printer makes tiny dots of each of the colors which are printed in a pattern. This is so small that with the human eye it appears as one color. A process called half toning keeps the primary colors from full saturation on the paper so the white paper beneath the dots can make colors such as pink using magenta.
The sublimation process used by these printers is accomplished by heating the dye from the ink until it turns into a gas. Then it spreads and is stored on a ribbon until it is needed. The printer rollers move one of the panels which are a part of the ribbon to the paper and it is heated. Repeating this three times for each of the colors, the final coat is the laminate coat which seals the colors and keeps them from returning to a gas state.