digital print comparison

ponderings / north america / digital print comparison

in the past few weeks, i've done a comparison of digital print prices/quality etc. although we have a sony photo printer (a dye-sublimation system), the cost per photo is relatively high and printing the photos individually can be quite time consuming. while i'm still going to use the photo printer for some photos, when i have more than 10 to print, i'm opting to use a service.

in testing each service, i bought prints from more than one directory on my cd. i also printed 2 identical prints with each service; one indoor and one outdoor. these were my finding:

london drugs

london drugs had by far the worst prices [59c (4x6), $1.98 (5x7), $5.98 (8x10)] and best service. they view the media with you, select the prints/sizes you need and have them ready in just over an hour. wonderful :-) the quality was very good, but just not quite enough to justify them costing over 50% more than other services. they do have a membership card you can buy, to get a free second set of prints, but it doesn't give you any reduction on price per print.

walmart

fantastic for price and speed [just over an hour], worst for quality [not that they look THAT bad though]. apart from quality being an issue, the fact all photos on your media are combined into one [gigantic, in my case] directory, was not helpful for me and meant that i had to slowly scroll through 36 pages of photos. however, i understand that this would probably make things a lot simpler if you were only ordering a single set of prints from one directory.

blacks

the price was not great - 49c [unless you pay for their $20 membership which gives you 35c prints]. if you have a single directory, you can just hand it to the front desk but if you need to choose individual photos/directories, you are directed to their work station where, after an irritating selection process, you get an order ticket to give back to the front desk. unfortunately, it would appear that even though the same people are doing the processing, they can only print onto matte from the work station [which nobody happened to mention to me]. i made them reprint the majority of the photos which were from the same directory. they couldn't quite manage an service in an hour either time - but that was probably because i was order 70 prints. overall. not impressed which is a shame because i really wanted to get their membership and 35c prints.

future shop

i'm not sure which was worse, the online process or pickup process - both were torture. at the time the price for prints on future shop was 29c (4x6), 99c (5x7) and $3.99 (8x10). these seem to have been specials since the prices are now 39c, $1.50 and $4.95 respectively. the quality unfortunately, was great!

the online ordering process was tedious. if you want to add additional prints, it take you back to the splash screen you arrived at on login. if you are ordering a lot of prints, it's also difficult to tell whether the shopping cart has retained previous choices or not.

usability is atrocious and navigation around the site is difficult. on my first attempt to order, i tried a promotion code to receive 5 free prints. i was greeted by 'no such code'. i tried lowercase [since in one place they showed the code in uppercase, and in another, they showed it in lowercase.] still 'no such code'. i gave up and deleted the code 'no such code' was still haunting me. arrrggg. i gave up. the next day i tried again and the computer continuously crashed just as i was tried to complete my order [probably due to the large number of prints]. third time lucky - on the third day, my order finally went through.

the photos took 5-6 days to be available for pickup, although according to the tracker, they were actually processed very quickly [1-2 days]. i also never actually received an email to say they were ready for pickup - it was only by checking the tracker everyday that i knew this.

when i arrived to collect the prints, there was a notice at the technicians desk [the collection point] saying it was closed and to go to customer service [which i did for 5 minutes]. eventually i asked one of the 3 managers standing around doing very little if it was possible to pick up prints at all when the collection points was shut. he told me to wait in the customer service line [which i did for another 10 minutes while the kids drove me slowly insane]. eventually someone who'd seen me asking the manager 10 minutes before took pity on me and took me to the collection point. after a lot of whining on my part, she did a good job of persuading me to give them a second chance.

needless to say, i was very irritated by the whole process and very annoyed to find that they were probably my best overall supplier in terms of quality v. cost. DOH!

[it seems shipping only costs $2 no matter how large the order, so i think i might try that in future. unfortunately, because of the way the shopping cart is set up, there doesn't seem to be any way of combining shipping on separate orders eg. a calendar and a set of prints]

supplier	type of service	price* [4x6]	quality	best for
london drugs	in person & online	59c	excellent	quality service
walmart	in person	25c	passable	price
blacks	in person & online	49c	good	membership benefits
future shop	online	39c	great	price v quality overall

* to the best of knowledge these were the prices at the beginning of november 2004 for each supplier

incidently, a good quality, completely personalized calendar from future shop is only $19.99 and from what i could ascertain - this was both the best quality and price from any of these 4 suppliers.