There are three main options when it comes to printing digital photos. You send them to a professional online printing service, you can take them to a local photo printing store or you can print them at home if you own a photo printer like the Canon PIXMA Pro 9000.

Printing photos at home is convenient. There is no wait time you can just push the print button and in a few seconds you have your photo ready. There are disadvantages of course to home photo printing. One is cost ? if you do not print many photos purchasing a high quality photo printing is an expense that is hard to justify. The other disadvantage is quality most low end home photo printers can not compete with professional printing services that use high end color printers.

Lately however the price of high quality photo printers has dropped and today for a price of less than $500 you can own a very good high quality photo printer like the Canon PIXMA Pro 9000. Many home photo printers are locked at a specific photo size most likely a 4X6 printer. If you need bigger photo prints you must send your digital photos to a professional service. The Canon PIXMA Pro 9000 on the other hand can go all the way up to 13? X 19?.

One of the challenges of color photo printing is color tuning. Photo printing services spend a lot of time and money on color tuning their printers. The Canon PIXMA uses a unique 8 color ink system that together with special color tuning software from Canon makes printing photos in the right color palette easy. The printing heads use Canon's FINE technology for high precision printing accomplishing very high resolutions of up to 4800 X 2400 dpi.

Another important parameter in photo printing quality is paper choice. Paper quality can vary and so does its price. Some photo printers only support one type of paper, usually a special photo printing expensive paper. The Canon PIXMA supports a wide variety of papers, from very think to very thick 1.2mm papers, from regular printing paper to high end photo paper thinckness of up to 1.2mm, matte as well as glossy.

Matte or glossy? That is another question to tackle. Which one to use really depends on how you are going to use the photo prints. A general rule is to use glossy photo prints for color prints and matte photo prints for black and white ones. Matte is better for photos that will be touched a lot and held by many people.

Although Canon tried to make photo printing easy it can still be confusing to the amateur or occasional photographer. If you are taking photos for fun and just need to print a batch every now and then it is probably easier and cheaper to just send them to an online photo printing service like Snapfish or Shutterfly. If you are a semi-professional or a professional photographer the Canon is a good option to quickly print photos, create samples for your customers and more. The cost of photo printing does not end with buying the camera. Expensive ink and paper can make each print cost in the cents and more.