Digital photo
print services review (part 1)
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-- [review part 2 - June 2004]
Introduction -- Test photos -- Cost -- Ease of use -- Delivery time -- Image quality -- Compare scans -- Cropping -- Final results
Image quality
A team of five people independently examined each photo without knowing who had printed them. Each person awarded each print marks out of five based on a subjective judgement of image quality. The mean score for each print is shown in the table below:
| Black & white |
Park |
Bath |
Building |
|
| Bonusprint |
3.3 |
2.8 |
2.8 |
2.3 |
| Boots |
2.8 |
1.8 |
4.3 |
3.0 |
| Canon i850 |
4.0 |
3.6 |
3.3 |
3.1 |
| Colab |
3.0 |
1.8 |
3.8 |
4.3 |
| digi-prints |
3.5 |
1.8 |
4.5 |
3.8 |
| Peak Imaging |
3.8 |
4.8 |
4.0 |
4.5 |
| Photobox* |
3.0* |
4.4* |
3.9* |
3.6* |
| Photodeal |
3.3 |
4.6 |
3.8 |
4.0 |
| Pixum |
1.8 |
2.8 |
2.8 |
2.3 |
The results are shown graphically in the following chart which plots the average score per photo per printing service. The error bars show the standard deviation of the marks awarded by the team for each print (the bigger the bar the greater the disagreement between the judges).
The "Park" photo showed the most marked difference in image quality between the printing services and this is reflected in the error bars above showing that there was most agreement between the judges on the marks awarded for this photo.
Scans of each print of the "Park" photo may be compared with the original image on this page. The scanned images do not capture the prints perfectly due to the limitations of the scanning process, although they do give an impression of the difference between the prints, especially regarding colour accuracy. Note how the clouds are almost completely lost in some prints and how yellow the grass is in others.
The prints from Boots, Colab and digi-prints were almost identical. The grass was too yellow, the sky was washed-out and the images appear to have been sharpened by the printers which has caused halos and unnatural high-contrast edges, making the prints look more like low-resolution digital photos than real photograph images. I suspect that these three companies use the same lab: their upload software was very similar, differing only in "application skin" and company logo, and, furthermore, when checking the progress of my order I found that the same order-tracking website showed all three of my orders even though they were with different companies. (note that they do not charge the same price for their prints, Boots is three times the price of digi-prints!) While the quality of the 6x4 prints from these three services were disappointing I found that a 12x8 enlargement of the same image I requested from digi-prints was excellent - on a par with the best (this can be seen in the scans).
All of the printing services with the exception of Bonusprint and Pixum use the Fuji FDi process which is capable of excellent results as shown by Peak Imaging, Photobox and Photodeal. Boots, Colab and digi-prints appear to apply some image "enhancement" prior to printing, which to my mind, and that of my colleagues, reduced the image quality significantly on the "Park" photo in particular. It seems that digi-prints do not apply the same "enhancement" to their 12x8 prints - perhaps this would also be the case with Boots and Colab. I should say that I queried the low quality prints with one of these three services and asked whether they did any image enhancement prior to printing, and if so could I turn it off...I was assured that they did not. Bonusprint and Pixum both print on Agfa paper and presumably use a different process to the other services. With the exception of the black and white print they received identical scores, which were always lower than the Fuji services (except for the "Park" photo where the three services mentioned earlier came out worst).
In summary, the average of the marks for image quality for each company is shown below, the error bars show the standard deviation of the average scores of each of the four prints by that company.
* Update (May 2004): I have been disappointed by the quality of recent prints from Photobox. They now exhibit the contrast/sharpening enhancement we had noticed with Boots, Colab and digi-prints (see above).
Bonusprint -- Boots -- Canon i850 inkjet -- Colab -- Digi-prints -- Peak Imaging -- Photobox -- Photodeal -- Pixum
© David Griffin, November 2003