Ever since the digital revolution hit film cameras on the head, people have been taking photos like there's no tomorrow. So how about a digital polaroid that prints out photos?

After hearing all of those other sounds, I stuck with the traditional. And you know what? Digital camera owners, despite all the photos they take which can be shared via email or posted to a web site, or burnt to CD and DVD, are choosing to do the traditional thing… and print their photos.

Only the good ones, of course. After all, if you printed them all, you'd be awash in paper and dry ink. Digital cameras let us take as many photos as we want - or at least as many as we have space for on our memory cards, and of course enough charge in the camera's battery.

That said, we're taking millions of photos, and we like to print the good ones out. But what we don't have is the 'digital Polaroid'. The digital camera that has a built-in printer, which can print immediately. We don't have this because it's too fiddly to create one. Sure, we have the technology, and it wouldn't cost $6 billion dollars. But the resulting camera would be too large, or the photos would be business card size, and when we want photos, we want photos. 4x6 inch prints, if you please.

So… it should come as no surprise that photo printers have been very popular. Indeed, almost any colour printer you buy today can easily take A4 and photo sized photographic paper, which can help produce photo quality prints. Each photo usually takes about a minute to print.

But new dedicated photo printers are also very popular. They generally print standard sized photos in a minute or less. Usually, they cost between $300 and $400. Some of the latest ones are small and portable, can take Bluetooth connections (so you can print wirelessly from your camera phone) and can take battery packs letting you print from anywhere.

But the photo printer we're looking at today is the Olympus P-10. It's not the smallest printer on the market, but it prints quality photos in around 45 seconds. You connect any PictBridge compatible digital camera (which is almost every camera on the market), select the photo you want to print, press a button on the camera, and the Olympus springs into life and gives you a photo. It's the closest thing to a digital Polaroid! It also means you don't need to use a computer at any time to get a photo printed.

Instead of using ink, the Olympus uses a "sublimation dye transfer printing system". This is different to traditional inkjet cartridges but works beautifully, Canon uses a similar process. The printed photo is durable and resistant to light, heat and moisture as well as water droplets and scratches.

You can have true borderless edge-to-edge prints, or traditional prints with borders. The unit's footprint is 7.5" x 7.7" so as we said, it's not the smallest printer out there, but it does print photos quickly and at high quality.

The thing that appeals most about this unit is the price. It used to be $299 – and it's now been reduced to $199 as of yesterday. Refill packs containing 100 sheets of photo paper and enough dye to cover 100 photos costs $79.95, meaning each photo costs around 79.5c to print. That's roughly on par with what you'll pay for other brands and at photo kiosks. It's a fair price – some brands are more expensive per print, and on the other hand, if you're going to print large quantities of photos, you're always better off taking them to a store and not only getting the best price but the convenience of dropping off a CD full of photos and coming back later to pick up the prints.

So… no matter what brand of camera you have, as long as it's PictBridge compatible, it will work with this printer. At the price, it's definitely tempting, and shows how far digital photography has come in the past decade.

Will you transform your digital camera into a 'digital Polaroid' this Christmas?