understanding photo printers

[Ultra Magnus]

I was wondering what printers are true professional quality photo printers for digital pictures. I have an inkjet printer, a pretty nice one, but there's a stark difference between a print off of my printer and one from an online printing source. The colors at home are very vivid and nice, but the difference mostly is that the ink on my photos from home scratches off real easy, and especially in b&w photos you can see the thickness of the ink when looked at an angle in the right light. My sister-in-law has one of those little kodak easy share 4x6 printers, and it does the colors one at a time (kinda neat to watch) and then at the last layers on a clear coat to seal it.

What is an ink sublimation printer anyway? I'm also pretty sure I saw a couple that claimed to have six colors?

Thanks.

[another view]

I'm not a printer expert but here's what I can tell you:

There actually are a lot of different types of printers out there, and they will all have their own look to them. Inkjets might use four or more colors (some of the big Epsons are six or seven?). Inkjet printers can be under $100 and up to a few thousand for the really large ones (almost 4' wide). Quality of an inkjet printer depends on so many things; the printer itself being only one of the factors.

Dye sublimation printers (a.k.a. dye sub) use a ribbon to transfer the color to the paper. Usually they're waterproof (without a coating) but I think they can only print up to about an 8x10 depending on the model. Like inkjets, I've seen really nice prints from them and crap.

Mini-labs like Fuji Frontiers use "real" photo paper and some combination of etching the paper and developing it in chemestry to make a print. That's why they look the most like a print that you're used to seeing. Frontiers only go up to 10x15, but the prints are usually very inexpensive and easy to get. As long as the machine is properly maintained, digital files with no color correction will look like whatever you give them every time. A lot of times I go to a local grocery store and pay less than $2 for an 8x10 that looks as good as a print from anywhere else, and is ready in 3 hours.