The digital camera boom is about to spark a photo printing bonanza, according to Japanese broker Nomura Securities.

Consumers are going to want to print their digital images, the firm claims. And with printer prices coming down, they are going to want to do that ever more often.

Photo printers however are just an in-between technology allowing modern (digital camera using) consumers to cling on to the old fashioned photo album age.

Show me a single person who jumps at the opportunity to spend a Sunday afternoon pasting photos into an album, and I'll show you an army of people who simply stick their photos in a shoebox.

Thanks to applications like iPhoto (Mac) and Picasa (Win), we don’t need paper photo albums. Add a media adapter or TiVo and you view you pictures from the couch – just like with an album but without the wasted Sundays.

And if you really want an album, about every online photo printing service will allow you to create one in just a fraction of the time that take to manaully paste the pictures.

Furthermore, online photo printing services are far more convenient than fumbling around at home printing and cutting your pictures. And they offer some nice additional services. Shutterfly will even allow you to create a card, enter a personal message and mail it for you. If you're in a hurry to get your picture, use Snapfish's one hour photo service and pick up your photo's at a local Walgreens store. The price still beats buying a printer, getting the supplies and making sure your ink cartridge doesn't run dry or gets clogged.

Tags: picasa, iphoto, shutterfly, snapfish

20 Dec 2005