Hardware

Calibrating your monitor may not sound exciting, but the results can be. Without a properly calibrated monitor, photo edits won't be accurate, and what you see on your screen isn't what the prints will look like. So you'll have to make some tweaks and print again...and again.

Thinner, brighter and more affordable than ever, LCDs continue to make major strides, delivering outstanding image quality without budget-busting price tags. Compared to now antiquated CRTs, LCDs produce noticeably brighter, sharper-looking images, use half (or less) as much power and take up far less desk space while delivering larger screen sizes.

With the Windows Vista and Mac Intel transitions behind us, now is a pretty safe time to consider replacing an aging computer, no matter which platform you prefer. Ample RAM for most photographers' needs is affordable, and many off-the-shelf systems boast solid digital-imaging specifications.

It may not be as exciting a topic as the latest D-SLR technologies, but color calibration is a critical part of digital photography. With a properly calibrated monitor, you can be confident that the adjustments you make to your images are exactly what you intend. Don't underestimate the importance of this! Adjusting an image on an uncalibrated screen can be a waste of time at best, and at worst, can cause permanent degradation to an image. You may also experience big frustration when your prints don't match what you see on screen.

With enough capacity on an external hard drive, you can store an entire library of photos in a space the size of a hardbound book. Externals offer fast plug-in and quick removal, too, for convenient transport of pictures, music, files or whatever media that you might need to grab and go.

Choosing the best photo printer for your needs may mean choosing more than one printer. We’ve come a long way from the one-size-fits-all office inkjets—with specialty photo printers ranging from fast and portable mini-printers for quick proofs and 4x6s to pro-quality, large-format printers for making frame-worthy display prints.

Here's a large-format inkjet photo printer (up to 13x19 inches) that offers excellent image quality, lots of control when you want it and simple operation. Producing dynamite digital photo prints quickly, the Canon PIXMA Pro9000 uses 6144 nozzles to distribute eight long-lasting dye-based Canon ChromaLife 100 inks in precise two-picoliter droplets—some 11 million of them per square inch-on a variety of Canon photo papers. The inks are in separate tanks, so when one color runs low, you need only replace that color, not an entire color ink cartridge.

Though enhancing my images can be fun, especially when I'm working with a great photograph, it also can be incredibly time consuming. I like making my photos look better, but increasingly, I much prefer to be outside just making images rather than seeing the hours flash by under the glow of the LCD monitor.

Backup is a little like flossing. We all know we should do it, but it just isn't a particularly fun part of photography. We'd all rather be out taking photos or working on them in our image-processing program than dealing with the details of files and being sure we've backed them up properly. Who can remember anyway?