Digital photography has greatly expanded the options available for both processing and sharing acquired images. As digital technology continuously improves, more and more individuals are using digital photography in place of traditional photography. A photo printer is used to print hard copies of the acquired images in a format similar to that used in traditional photography. Photo printers are different from general printers. The major difference is that photo printers print images such as a photo pictures on paper with high picture quality. The digital photo printer is capable of converting the image into digital image data and determining an exposure condition upon printing through the image data processing and is therefore able to obtain a high-definition print. Examples of photo printers include a laser printer, a liquid crystal printer using a liquid crystal shutter array, and the like. Photo printers feature low-noise, high-quality and high-speed, and are now replacing conventional wire dot matrix printers. A photo printer is controlled by a printer controller which converts coded print data of characters, figures and graphs sent from a host computer into print dot data which is stored in a bit map memory. Photo printers may have digital media readers (
memory cards) to conveniently print pictures without a computer. An automatic photo-printer determines an appropriate print-exposure in accordance with three color densities of a negative to be printed, which are measured by an image scanner such as a
CCD scanner mounted in the photo-printer.
