  Photo-detection plays a fundamental role in experimental quantum optics and
is of particular importance in the emerging field of linear optics quantum
computing. Present theoretical treatment of photo-detectors is highly idealized
and fails to consider many important physical effects. We present a physically
motivated model for photo-detectors which accommodates for the effects of
finite resolution, bandwidth and efficiency, as well as dark-counts and
dead-time. We apply our model to two simple well known applications, which
illustrates the significance of these characteristics.
