Until recently, pictures made with ink-jet printers looked like pointillist paintings — you could see every dot. That's fine for impressionist art, but not for your family photographs. Even worse, the ink-jet images faded quickly.

Thanks to major breakthroughs in printer technology and improved ink and paper, however, you can now produce images from your ink-jet printer that look just as good and last just as long as traditional photographs. Some ink-jet images are even more resistant to fading than old-fashioned snapshots. Now that you can get excellent water-and light-resistant photographs from printers priced as low as $130, it may be time to upgrade.