Online photo printing services reviewed
I’ve just completed a test of various Internet photo printing services, and thought I’d share the results with you. (I previously found a review from Photography Blog, but that’s a little out of date.)
I wanted to send a lot of digital snaps off to be printed, but didn’t know who’d give the right balance of cost and quality. I recently rejected Kodak EasyShare Gallery because their EasyShare upload software was a pile of pants. I’ve since moved to managing my photos with Picasa (having never even considered that photos need “managing”) because it’s got some very handy features, once you get used to the non-standard user interface, and it’s integrated with a number of photo printing services. This is how I got on with all the printing services currently available to UK users of Picasa…
The services in use
I chose to send three sample images to a number of companies. The images were in the region of 1600 x 1200 pixels (well, somewhat less since I’ve discovered the joys of cropping) which should come out fine at 6” x 4”, but less so at 7” x 5”. I thought it would be interesting to try all three prints at both sizes. Also, none of the photos’ dimensions were in quite the same ratio as the standard print sizes, so I wanted a service that would allow some kind of “shrink to fit”. That is, I didn’t want the photos to be cropped to fit the print size, I wanted them to be shrunk so they fitted entirely within the print. Finally, I was going for matt rather than gloss.
By the way, although I’m giving costs here it should be noted that most services have special offers for first-time users, so these aren’t hugely indicative of final costs to you or me.
PhotoBox has many options for print size and type, including shrink to fit. After uploading each photo and choosing its print size you get a quality bar showing how good on a sliding scale the result will be at that size. The bar is also coloured red/yellow/green as a further guide. Overall the user interface is a little awkward, but fairly clear and it is reliable. My six prints cost £2.10 and the order was confirmed by e-mail. There was also a PayPal option. Security fans beware: my password was mailed to me in plain text.
Snapfish are owned by HP. Prints are limited to only four basic sizes plus a special size to fit digital cameras (5.3” x 4”), but there’s no shrink to fit options (which means these comparisons were suddenly becoming very difficult). After upload and selecting print sizes there was no quality indicator, which means you could end up ordering sizes too large to be of good quality. I felt the user interface lacked options. Cost was £1.86 with the order confirmed by e-mail, as was (again) my password in plain text. There was no option for PayPal, but there was an option to pick up the prints at Jessops and so save on the delivery.
MyPixMania.com looks appallingly garish, but it was advertised widely in Paris when we were there last, so I felt I had an obligation to you, dear reader, to try out a service with a high profile and which is obviously moving across Europe. Data purists beware: not only was my registration password confirmed in plain text, but the registration form gave options only for Mr, Mrs and Miss — women cannot use MyPixMania unless they reveal their availability for marriage. The user interface offers various facilities, but is very difficult to use. At one stage my cropping options popped up in French; later my order details were sent to me twice — once saying the order had been registered (whatever that means) and once saying it had been confirmed. There are many photo sizes on offer but no shrink to fit, so my photos are having to be cropped. Expected quality is shown by red/yellow/green icons. Finally the cost: a whopping £5.99, including a rather dubious £1.70 “handling fee”. Obviously they’ve got handle the stuff — why isn’t that included in the pricing?
Klick is one of the few sites that doesn’t require registration — each order is entirely individual. It actually uses the FotoWire front end, so it’s really just a standard product with customisation. But it’s not necessarily worse for that — the interface is wonderfully simple and intuitive, and really shows how these things can be done. On the down side the options are a little too basic. Shrink to fit is an option, but the print sizes are limited and there’s no option for matt or gloss — in fact, I’m only going to find out which I chose when the prints turn up — and the quality warning is only a single yellow marker or not, so you’ve no idea how low the quality will be. Cost was £2.02, with no PayPal option, and rather oddly my order confirmation arrived with a total cost but not a breakdown of what I ordered.
Bonusprint also use Fotowire, at least if you’re uploading from Picasa, and so also have a lovely user interface — but they’ve got more print sizes available and both matt and gloss options. Again, no registration. Cost £2.31, and this time not only did the order confirmation arrive without a breakdown of the details, it didn’t include a total cost — just an order number. Oh yes, and there was a rather curious option to pick up your prints from their head office rather than have them delivered, which is nice if you live in Borehamwood but of less use to the rest of us.
I also need to mention the other services available from Picasa which for one reason or another I didn’t order prints from…
Pixum looked like a promising option, but I couldn’t order duplicate prints in different sizes without reuploading them. I did note that there was no shrink to fit option, and a limit of only four print sizes. Nice logo, though.
Pixdiscount again insisted women discuss marriage before ordering (Mr/Mrs/Miss options only) and only offered glossy prints, albeit in quite a few sizes. However the big barrier for me was that after I uploaded my pictures they all appeared as broken thumbnail images in my shopping basket. So I couldn’t see which was which and it was essentially impossible to manage my order. I had to abandon that.
Extrafilm, finally, was arguably worse. It started well with nice integration with Picasa but went down hill from there. There was no matt or gloss option, and like Klick they didn’t say which they were offering. But it became totally unmanageable when I found I couldn’t get my shopping basket changes to match the order confirmation screen — I’d delete one photo from my basket and it would reappear on the order confirmation, I’d change the format of another and it wouldn’t change on the confirmation screen. Eventually there was no way I could trust them with my order and again I had to abandon it.
The delivery
The photos were ordered on a Sunday, and all bar MyPixMania delivered by the Wednesday. MyPixMania took their time. Their international nature meant not just popups in the wrong language, but odd cultural differences, too. On the Friday I received a mail which began like this:
One of our employees, Isabelle, has just finished processing with great care your order CCP062407804.
Your order will be forwarded and delivered as quickly as possible to the following address [...]
Perfectly good English but just… odd. Oh well. The photos finally arrived on the Tuesday, eight days after they were ordered, posted from France.
The results
The three photos I sent were as follows:
- A dark restaurant interior with bright window, cropped so severely that it was never going to be great quality when printed.
- A light interior, using a flash.
- A sunny outdoor scene.
All photos were requested in two sizes, but in the end that didn’t make much difference. Even the resolution quality seemed the same at the larger size. Here’s how they came out…
For the dark interior, Bonusprint and PhotoBox did the best of a bad job, with their matt prints not adding too much artificial colour. Klick ranked middle, while MyPixMania and Snapfish trailed, overcolouring the scene and, without cropping, blowing up to create too much fuzz.
For the light interior Bonusprint came top; their prints were a little grey, but on returning to the original I found that to be similarly grey. They were simply reflecting what was there. Snapfish, MyPixMania and PhotoBox ranked middle because they added a richness of colour which wasn’t present in the original. Klick did worst of all, not only adding false colour, but with so much contrast where the flash hit that the detail it lit up was almost entirely washed away in a glare of white.
Finally the sunny outdoor scene. None of the services really matched what I saw on the screen — the digital original is fairly light, detailed and with a fair range of colours. Bonusprint did the best, however. Theirs were a little washed out compared to what was there, losing some of the contrasting colours, but they were light and showed all the detail. Snapfish and MyPixMania come second, with some detail lost in excessive shadow, but good (if slightly too rich) colouring. PhotoBox sacrificed too much loss of detail for too much rich colouring, while Klick produced the poorest result with very high contrast again and detail lost this time not in glare but in darkness.
Conclusions
I’ve always seen Bonusprint having a brand image of cheapness, but on this test there’s no doubt for me they’ve produced the most faithful prints. PhotoBox is probably next, having at least never produced the worst prints. Klick come last, with consistent excessive contrast losing detail in both whiteness and blackness.
Both Bonusprint and PhotoBox also offered me exactly what I wanted: matt prints, shrunk to fit. Here again, though, Bonusprint came out on top, as they added borders only were necessary to shrink to fit, whereas PhotoBox added borders all the way round, and more so on the edges that needed it for shrinking. Those services that didn’t offer shrink to fit ended up compromising what might otherwise have been better pictures. In the severely-cropped restaurant interior I ended up losing one of the subjects.
It’s been an unexpected lesson for me, too, having to compare pictures in circumstances I’d never previously considered. I don’t consider myself a photographer, but even I could see the differences when comparing prints side by side. And after finding that some of my photos have turned out a bit grey because the originals were a bit grey, I’m going to spend a bit more time tuning the colouring in Picasa before I send off any more.
