Digital photo print services review (part 2)

Home -- Test prints -- Print quality

After reviewing a range of on-line digital photo printing services at the end of 2003, Peak Imaging, Photobox and Photodeal came out on top with the latter two offering the best value for money for high quality prints. Print orders from Photobox in May 2004, however, show that contrast and brightness are now being modified in the printing process to the extent that details in highlight areas are washed out, some colours are printed unnaturally bright and any sharpening artifacts present in the original images are emphasised noticeably. Photobox were very helpful in attempting to resolve the problem but after several reprints with identical results they were unable to account for this change in print quality.

I decided to retest those companies that did well in the previous review (Photodeal and Peak Imaging) and a few others too. I selected five test photos - two from the previous tests and three others that had been printed poorly in the recent order.

The prints were sent to the following on-line companies: Colorama, Digital-lab, Fotoinside, Klick, Ofoto, Peak Imaging, Photobox, and Photodeal. They were also taken in person on CD to: Asda, Boots, Jessops, and an independent photography shop. As before, I also printed them on a Canon i850 inkjet printer.

As in the previous review I got several friends to mark each photo, without knowledge of who had printed them. Marks were awarded out of five based on the subjective assessment by each reviewer of the print quality. The average scores are shown below:

*not tested/printed

The average score for each company is shown graphically below, the error bars show the standard deviation of the mean score of the five prints (the smaller the error bar the more consistent the print quality).

Print quality against cost is plotted in the following graph (see here for a commentary on the print quality from each company). Note that the price shown is per print for an order of 100 prints with the postage cost included... also note that the price may be significantly higher for smaller orders (e.g. Peak Imaging charge 95p per print for less than 10 prints). I selected 100 prints for the comparison below as I have found that I tend to wait until I have a large batch of photos to print before submitting an order.

Delivery time, ease of use and print cropping were assessed and included in a total test score in part 1 of this review - I hope to incorporate this in part 2 when I have time. There are scans of examples of the best and worst prints here and there is a more detailed description of what we found unacceptable in those prints that received low scores here.

Delivery time was instant for the Canon inkjet and the Boots kiosk, and one hour for Asda and the local photography shop. Colorama, Digital-lab, Peak Imaging, Photobox and Photodeal all delivered prints in one working day. Ofoto and Klick took two working days and Fotoinside and Jessops took three working days.

To conclude, we found that, apart from Ofoto and Peak Imaging, all companies produced at least one print of unacceptable quality out of the batch of five images selected for this test. Ofoto and Peak Imaging made good quality prints without reducing resolution, modifying contrast or enhancing sharpening artifacts. They are therefore the overall winners.

I ought to add that I think it is a pity that Photobox are now producing inferior quality prints as they have a very usable ftp upload facility, a fantastic delivery time, as well as one very useful feature that I have not seen elsewhere: they extract the time/date information from the jpg EXIF data and print it on the back of the print. This is an extremely useful feature that I wish everyone would/could provide.

Update September 2007: Recent prints from Kodak Easyshare Gallery (was Ofoto) are not of the same high quality as in this test - see comments here.

Home -- Review part 1, November 2003

© David Griffin, June 2004