Hardcopy technologies for digital photography

An explosion of interest in digital photography has occurred in the past few years. Numerous new film scanning, cam-era, software, and printing products have become available, each representing a price or quality breakthrough, or both. While ''digital photography'' as a concept is readily grasped, just under the surface Lie a number of challenging systems problems in two worlds that do not normally communicate with each other: photography and digital systems design. We outline here some key issues from each of these worlds that impact the ability to routinely generate quality hardcopy of photographic images, such as imaging models and descriptors of image quality in the digital domain. Understanding and resolving these issues is key to routinely obtaining qual-ity output from a digital photography system. In addition, we survey printing technologies and describe some recent ad-vances in thermal inkjet technology which enable photo quality printing.