Printing can be thought of as a kind of exporting—not only figuratively but also because, to print a document, by default Inkscape exports it to the format that the printer understands—which, depending on the printer driver, is either PostScript or PDF (SVG-capable printers exist but are rare so far). If you select the Print to file option from the Print dialog, you will get a PS or PDF file that looks exactly the same as if you saved your file with this file type.
Most of the options in your Print dialog (such as paper size, margins, print quality, and so on) will depend on your operating system and the printer driver. The only thing that Inkscape adds to this dialog is the Rendering tab.
By default, Inkscape prints by exporting the document to a vector format (PostScript or PDF). As explained earlier, Inkscape is smart enough to rasterize those objects using the features these formats don’t support: filters (both PS and PDF) and transparency (PS only). However, if for some reason you don’t like this selective rasterization, you can render the entire document into bitmap by switching from Vector to Bitmap on the Rendering tab and setting the bitmap resolution. This option is generally safer, as it avoids any kinds of surprises that format conversion may hold, but it may result in very large print files and slow printing.