Having amassed a large and growing number of digital photographs I thought it was time to print some for the photo album. I suspected that it would be expensive and time consuming to print them all on my inkjet printer and decided to try out the online digital photo printing services.

A quick search of the web and the newsgroups showed there were plenty of companies offering this service, but that there were differing opinions on which was best. I read the excellent review at photographyblog.com and decided to try the winners as well as a few other companies that seemed to offer good value for money. I sent the same four prints to all of the services listed at the bottom of the page and I roped in a few friends to judge the quality of the prints in an attempt to get a more balanced, if not objective, opinion.

We found that Peak Imaging produced the best quality prints but Photobox and Photodeal gave better value for money for good quality prints.

Update (May 2004): I have been disappointed by the quality of recent prints from Photobox. I can no longer say that they are good quality, although they are no worse than the prints I saw from Colab, digi-prints and Boots last November. I am currently checking out some other companies and will report the results here shortly.