I know a lot of people have been asking about how to print photos from digicams. Well I needed a new printer, so I bought the HP PhotoSmart PSC 2610 All-in-One. It retails at about $260 but there are sales and rebates out there (I got a $100 rebate through Apple). it prints, copies, faxes and scans and can even make borderless copies of color photos.

It has slots in the front for many different camera memory cards and certain docks can be plugged in via USB. You can print directly from a memory card without a computer, which is what I did in my test yesterday. There are several ways of doing this. One way is that you can go through the photos on the printer's own screen, you just hit the left and right buttons to see each one in turn and if you want to print it, you press "OK", you can also zoom in and rotate photos in this mode, and there are other enhancements that you can enable. After you've selected all of your images, you just hit start and it prints them all for you in the size and ayout you choose.

Another REALLY COOL way to print photos is that you can print a proof sheet of 20 images per sheet. Under each photo on the proof sheet is a scantron bubble. You use a pen to fill in the bubbles of the ones you want printed as well as the bubble under which layout you'd like and then you scan the sheet on the printer and it automaticaly prints them. It's amazing!

I used 8/5 X11 HP Premium Plus Photo Paper and the standard color and photo color print cartridges to print about 24 4x6 prints. it used 8 sheets of paper (which was $20 for 25 sheets), and it looks like maybe 1/4 of each cartridge...I'm not sure yet how to read the ink meters. It's a little more expensive than those photo kiosks from CVS but let me tell you the qquaity is AMAZING. It's 20x better than those kiosks at least. I used, I think the best paper they make, and I'm sure you could make it less expensive with ess expensive paper. this paper is really heavy and feels like canvas on the back. You also don't need both cartridges, but the quality was incredible, plus for the convenience of doing it at home, it may be worth the extra $. It defintiely is on the quality side.

It has 4 different print cartridges, 2 can be in at a time. It comes with regular color and black and white. For photos you can buy an additional coor cartridge and a grey cartridge for B&W photos. I bought both for about $25 each at Staples.

The ony downside right now has nothing to do with print quality. I wanted to hook my printer directly into my wired network, but for some reason the ethernet cable won't snap all the way in in the back. I believe it has a faulty port. At first they told me it would take 50 days to send me a new one from the warranty center but since I explained that I need it for school, they're sending me a brand new one from the HP store as if I had bought it. Very accomodating. A+