After seeing a fantastic thread on babyworld linking to a website that hosts links to all the websites offering free prints I decided to try a few out for review purposes.
One of the saddest things, personally, about having 'gone digital' in the time that's elapsed since the birth of our first daughter is that we rarely print photographs these days, and what are photos for if not printing?
First up this week was snapfish and kodak. On the surface Kodak seems slightly more generous offering 30 free prints to snapfish's 20, however their upload interface is clunky and slow (arduously so, I nearly didn't bother uploading all 30 in the end) and their processing and postage times are longer. Hence the reason I can only comment on snapfish's prints today.
The prints arrived promptly and within the stated delivery time, communication was good and I received system generated e-mail every step along the way. They arrived well packaged and protected by masses of promotional information for their gift ranges etc.
On the whole the prints themselves were good quality. I uploaded a variety of colour processing methods and resolutions to see how they dealt with them. All were already in 6x4 proportions. Interestingly snapfish did not agree with lightroom as many of the images which I watermarked show that some cropping and resizing has taken place -the edges of the watermark are missed off. There was some colour distortion where more artistic processing methods had been used also, and I was disappointed in that those files that were very high resolution actually did not look 'that' much better than those that were essentially uploaded at web standard. Perhaps this would have shown up on a larger print.
The one huge unexpected jewel in the crown amongst the prints was a black & white conversion, it was printed exquitly which I certainly did not expect. That particular print has now become our photo album cover.
So overal snapfish provided a good level of service and adequate level of quality in prints, cropping and sizing issues would prevent me using a lab like this for client proofing but would be perfectly good for printing all our post-Christmas snaps.
One of the saddest things, personally, about having 'gone digital' in the time that's elapsed since the birth of our first daughter is that we rarely print photographs these days, and what are photos for if not printing?
First up this week was snapfish and kodak. On the surface Kodak seems slightly more generous offering 30 free prints to snapfish's 20, however their upload interface is clunky and slow (arduously so, I nearly didn't bother uploading all 30 in the end) and their processing and postage times are longer. Hence the reason I can only comment on snapfish's prints today.
The prints arrived promptly and within the stated delivery time, communication was good and I received system generated e-mail every step along the way. They arrived well packaged and protected by masses of promotional information for their gift ranges etc.
On the whole the prints themselves were good quality. I uploaded a variety of colour processing methods and resolutions to see how they dealt with them. All were already in 6x4 proportions. Interestingly snapfish did not agree with lightroom as many of the images which I watermarked show that some cropping and resizing has taken place -the edges of the watermark are missed off. There was some colour distortion where more artistic processing methods had been used also, and I was disappointed in that those files that were very high resolution actually did not look 'that' much better than those that were essentially uploaded at web standard. Perhaps this would have shown up on a larger print.
The one huge unexpected jewel in the crown amongst the prints was a black & white conversion, it was printed exquitly which I certainly did not expect. That particular print has now become our photo album cover.
So overal snapfish provided a good level of service and adequate level of quality in prints, cropping and sizing issues would prevent me using a lab like this for client proofing but would be perfectly good for printing all our post-Christmas snaps.
1 comment:
ooh, thanks for the review. I use Photobox, and am quite impressed with the quality and speed of deilvery, minus a few cropping issues.
Post a Comment