If there’s one thing to love about digital photography, it’s the instant gratification. There’s no reason to wait one hour for your prints. If you have your own home digital photo lab, within minutes, you can shoot, print, and flip through a stack of prints - and you don’t have to spend a ton of money on heavy equipment.

 

Printing your own photos at home is easier now than it’s even been. Home photo printers and point-and-shoot cameras are filled with features that make it easier than ever to print your shots, and most cameras and printers produce great pictures right out of the box. Prices are so low that you can put together a great printer and camera combo for $600 or less - we mention the manufacturer’s suggested retail prices for each product, but chances are, you can find a printer or camera for a few dollars less than the MSRP.

 

The only problem is the surfeit of options. So we’ve tested and paired five cameras with five printers to conjure up a few examples of the perfect photo lab. The Best Bet section (below) features a great camera and printer. The Price/Performance category (p2) will cost you a little less money but doesn’t require any significant compromises in capability. Our Budget combo (p3) produces the best bang for the buck, and we also give you a couple of additional options to consider. Almost all of the printers featured here don’t even require a Mac. You can use either the PictBridge technology that lets you print directly from your camera via USB, or you can insert the camera’s memory card into the printer’s memory-card slot.

 

BEST BET

The 10-megapixel Nikon Coolpix P5000 is a small camera with a big set of features that can dramatically improve the images you capture. Nikon’s Red-Eye Fix does an excellent job of ensuring that your photo subjects won’t look like crazed, laser-eyed werewolves. Face Priority finds and automatically focuses on your subject’s faces rather than some arbitrary other point in the frame. D-Lighting subtly bumps up brightness and detail when you’re shooting in dim conditions, while Vibration Reduction cuts back on out-of-focus shots due to unsteady hands.

 

All of these features worked perfectly in our tests. With its complement of manual controls, this is also a camera you can grow into. You’ll get great shots whether you put the camera on automatic, opt for full manual control, or land somewhere in between. Optional add-on lenses (a telephoto converter lens that extends the reach of the zoom to 378mm for long-distance shots, and a wide-angle converter lens with a focal length of 24mm) also extend this camera’s potential.

 

Our only small gripe: Like virtually all compact digital cameras, the Coolpix P5000 takes its time focusing (about 1.6 seconds to focus in perfect lighting conditions) and so it isn’t best suited for capturing action shots unless you prefocus (frame the image, depress the shutter button halfway, hold it there until the perfect picture presents itself, and then fully depress the shutter). But the images we took with the Coolpix P5000 were terrific overall, with vibrant, natural color, good contrast, and virtually no noise - even the ones captured in dim outdoor lighting and harsh indoor lighting. And the P5000 accepts an external flash unit, a nice plus.

 

Pair the Coolpix P5000 with Canon’s Pixma MP610, with its printer, scanner and memory-card reader, and you have a home photo lab capable of turning out excellent prints. The Pixma MP610 speedily produces crisp, true–to-life color pictures and decent black-and-whites from its five ink cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow, and two black inks). It has a bright 2.5-inch color LCD for previewing photos, and you can set it to print a contact sheet of the last 36, 72, 108, or 144 pictures stored on your camera’s memory card, which is much quicker than flipping though a slew of photos on a card. It handles paper sizes from business cards to 8 by 10 inches.

 

Camera: Nikon Coolpix P5000 ($399.95), Printer: Canon Pixma MP610 ($199.99), Total Cost: About $600

 

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Camera: Nikon Coolpix S51c ($329.95), Printer: HP Photosmart C7280 ($299.99), Total Cost: About $630

 

PRICE/PERFORMANCE

The chic Coolpix S51c sports a 3.0-inch LCD with antireflection coating and a 160-degree viewing angle. The camera includes Nikon’s new Expeed high-performance image-processing system, and is nicely responsive, focusing a bit faster than many other point-and-shoots.

 

Beyond the outstanding image captures (vibrant but natural color and nicely saturated, detailed shadows in all lighting conditions), the coolest feature is that the camera can connect directly to the Internet via Wi-Fi. You can upload images to Nikon’s Picture Bank storage service and stash 2GB of pictures for free, upload images directly to your Flickr account, or send email directly from the camera. It’s a great way to back up your pictures on vacation or during a busy shooting day. You also get six months of free T-Mobile access, so you can zip off your images from the 8,000 or so T-Mobile HotSpots nationwide. The Coolpix S51c also has all the image-correction features offered by the Coolpix P5000 (p1).

 

HP’s Photosmart C7280 is a terrific six-ink printer (complete with a copier) that produces excellent color and good black-and-white images at superfast speeds, spitting out 4-by-6-inch prints in about 13 seconds in our tests. Print from your Mac or directly from the printer by inserting the camera’s memory card into the onboard slot. You can also do basic image editing on the 3.5-inch touchscreen. The Photosmart C7280 prints images from 4 by 6 inches to 8.5 by 14, and it supports HP’s Auto Sense technology. That means that when compatible papers are put in the printer, it automatically selects the right settings for the media (plain paper, special inkjet paper, glossy, matte, etc.), and will even alert you if the paper is incorrectly loaded.

 

EXPENSIVE PRINTER, BUDGET CAMERA

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS70S produces surprisingly good images - with well-balanced color and good exposure - considering its low price. It’s not the most comfortable camera to handle, with no handgrip, but this isn’t a huge problem. The optical stabilization feature does a great job of reducing image blur created by jittery hands. For shooting moving objects, the Venus Engine III image-processing system kicks in and automatically bumps up the ISO setting and shutter speed according to how fast the subject is moving and the lighting conditions. A couple dozen preset scene modes make setting up shots a snap. All in all, it’s a good choice for anyone who wants a reasonably priced, easy-to-use camera.

 

Epson’s outstanding Stylus Photo 1400 uses six ink cartridges and can spray out ink drops as small as 1.5 picoliters, producing prints with supersmooth transitions and clear, true colors with fine detail in both bright and dark areas of the images. This is a printer intended for serious photographers, and Epson probably assumes this audience will be refining their images in Photoshop before printing, so there’s no card reader onboard.

 

You can print images from 4 by 6 inches to 13 by 44 (on paper stock as thick as 0.11mm) and can also print on inkjet-compatible CDs and DVDs. One possible caveat, given its target market: This isn’t the printer to buy if you want to print drop-dead perfect black-and-white images, and it doesn’t produce truly neutral prints (few, if any, under-$500 printers do). Noir fans will be better off with Epson’s nine-cartridge Stylus Photo R2400 ($849.99). Otherwise, this is yet another excellent photo printer from Epson.

 

Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-LS70S ($149.95), Printer: Epson Stylus Photo 1400 ($349.99), Total Cost: About $500

 

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Camera: Olympus Stylus 770SW ($379.99), Printer: Epson Stylus Photo R380 ($129.99), Total Cost: About $510

 

Olympus says, “A camera that’s made to photograph your life should be tough enough to survive it.” So go ahead and dive into a pool with the Stylus 770SW, drop it, dump stuff on top of it, expose it to dust, sand, dirt, extreme temperatures, inflict pretty much whatever torture tests you can dream up, and the Stylus 770SW will cheerfully keep on working. Granted, it’s not the world’s fastest camera - a bit sluggish when saving high-resolution pictures - but the benefits far outweigh this small drawback.

 

Image quality was very good in both indoor and outdoor light, with natural colors, no loss of detail in the shadows, and just a bit of noise at ISOs over 400. The bright 2.5-inch LCD is readable even in strong sunlight. The preset scene modes (there are 24) include settings for candlelight, cuisine, objects behind glass, and several underwater options along with the more-standard preset modes. There’s even a built-in manometer that records water and air pressures, nice for those scuba-diving (the 770SW is waterproof to 33 feet without a case) and mountain-climbing pictures.

 

The six-ink Epson Stylus Photo R380 also has a unique feature set. Besides producing the usual prints from your photos, it also prints still captures from video (we had a great time capturing video with the 770SW and watching it on the printer’s display screen; you just press a button to grab and print an image), and it prints on inkjet-compatible CDs and DVDs.

 

And the images it produces are really terrific - photos are crisp and clear. The printer automatically analyzes and adjusts the color and lighting of each image, plus it removes red-eye. The video grabs are more than decent, and the CDs and DVDs look great. Direct from your memory card or Mac, you can crop and edit photos using the printer’s 3.5-inch color LCD.

 

BUDGET

The 5-megapixel Canon PowerShot A460 is a great camera for a beginning photographer or someone who doesn’t want to fuss with a multitude of features and options. A nice collection of preset shooting modes makes it easy to set the camera to capture scenes such as fireworks, snow, and foliage. And even if you don’t select a specific mode, Canon’s multipoint Artificial Intelligent Auto-Focus (AiAF) system chooses and applies the optimum focus, and the camera can also adjust exposure and white balance.

 

All of the menus are exceptionally easy to navigate. Images have nicely saturated color, but shooting in low-light conditions will tend to produce images that are a bit noisy. At this price point, you really can’t expect perfection, but the PowerShot A460 provides more features than you’d think a budget camera would have. It even captures video.

 

Epson’s portable PictureMate Dash PM 260 is the perfect companion for this (or any other) digital camera. The (dare we say “cute”?) little lunchbox form-factor (complete with carrying handle) makes it seem almost like a toy, but once the Dash starts churning out images, all doubts are removed - it’s a very capable printer. Pop your camera’s memory card into the slot, crop and edit on the large 3.6-inch LCD, and print really outstanding (natural color, sharp) prints with or without borders.

 

Epson claims the photos produced by the Dash will last two to four times longer than lab prints; we didn’t have enough time to test for longevity, but the images were certainly scratch- and water-resistant. The Dash spits out 4-by-6-inch prints, assorted wallet sizes, portrait packages (four per page and 10 per page) and proof sheets. Printing a slew of pics won’t break your budget, because ink and paper (glossy or matte) come in the $35 PictureMate Print Pack, which contains supplies for about 150 prints. You can also archive photos directly to CDs or print from a CD or DVD.

 

Camera: Canon PowerShot A460 ($129.95), Printer: Epson PictureMate Dash PM 260 ($99.99), Total Cost: About $230