Sizes range from large format models that can print poster-sized pics of your grandmother's 80th birthday party to small, portable models capable of printing glossy 4-by-6-inch photos while you're still at the party. Standard desktop inkjets can print directions to the party, as well as 8-by-10-inch photos when you get back home.

The more the merrier? Inkjets use different combinations of inks. General-purpose inkjets use anywhere from three colors (Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) to four (adding black). Three-color inkjets tend to be less expensive and you only have to replace the one cartridge; the tradeoff is that those three colors must be used to make the color black, and in some three-color inkjets, these "composite" blacks and grays can exhibit a blue or greenish hue.

Inkjets that specialize in just printing photos can use twice the number of inks described above as well as gloss optimizers to increase the quality of printed photographs. But there's a high price per print for these photo-specific inkjets, so using them to print out something more mundane like airline boarding passes or Web articles can be a costly proposition.

Our favorite inkjet printers

The PictureMate Zoom PM 290 from Epson is a portable photo printer. Limited in size to 4-by-6 and smaller prints, the PictureMate gives you lab-quality, smudge, water and fade resistant photos in about a minute for as little as 25 cents a print. You can also save your photos to CD via the built in burner. . [US$230 (), ]