Everyone and his brother now have digital cameras. Many are content to view pics on screen or post to web sites but sometimes a hard copy print is desired.
Photo paper is expensive so you don’t want to waste it. There are several programs that let you maximize pics on a sheet and Windows XP has a nice printing wizard built-in that does the same thing.
But for a real novice (think of all the newbies getting digicams for Christmas) I saw a cool solution. Hardware wiz Dan Davenport has the new HP psc 2210 printer (combo with fax, scanner, copier). Like many newer printers you can pop in a memory card and bypass the PC altogether. But what’s really neat is how it uses the printer and scanner to make it a piece of cake to print your images.
After inserting a memory card (or downloading from a digicam) you can print a proof sheet. This prints a contact sheet of thumbnails of the images along with some blank circles and titles. First you fill in the circle (like an SAT test) with a pen for the images you want to print.
Then you fill in the circles for number of prints, size, and so on. Then you feed the completed sheet back into the printer (via the scanner feature) and it reads your input and prints the photos you chose in the quantity you selected and to the specifications you chose. Couldn’t be simpler.
This is the kind of intelligence that devices need to really reach the mainstream audience.
12:55:11 PM 
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