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By Eamon Hickey
(July 17, 2003)
Way back in the early days of digital photography--five years ago--the photo industry had a term for all the steps necessary to get prints from your digital pictures. We called it the chain of pain.
Nowadays, the process isn't so torturous, thanks in part to the proliferation of photo-printing and -sharing Web sites. All offer free membership and a basic set of now familiar services. Via your Web browser, you upload your digital pics to a site's server. Your photos are then organized into online albums, which you can invite friends and family to view. You and your guests can order true photographic prints from those albums, and the service will mail them to any address.
We tested 10 leading online printing outfits. We ran each site through its paces, sent questions to customer support, and ordered prints of photos that included colorful subjects, a variety of skin tones, and several problem images that were badly exposed or heavily tinted by the wrong white-balance setting.
Every site we tested fared well in terms of ease of use. Better yet, print-quality scores were good virtually across the board, though we judged Fujifilm.net the champ. The biggest variation we found was in pricing, so keep your eye on the bottom line.
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1. Club Photo | Editors' rating: 7.6 |
Pros: Large image displays; lots of novelty-gift options. Cons: No editing tools; minimal online help. Club Photo is easy to use, and it displays your images at larger sizes than most other sites, whether you're looking at thumbnails of your whole album or individual photos. The service also offers an unusually long list of novelty photo gifts, including handcrafted pencil sketches and oil paintings made from your images. But the site lacks editing tools and offers only bare-bones help. Prints are available in a wide variety of sizes up to 24x36 inches. Each 4x6 print costs 25 cents, and 8x10s are $3.99 apiece. We were happy with the colors and the skin tones in our test shots, and we give Club Photo good marks for overall print quality. |
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2. DotPhoto | Editors' rating: 7.8 |
Pros: Wide range of print sizes; subscription and bulk print plans; allows you to sell images through the site. Cons: Lacks editing and enhancement tools; subpar help section. Trigger-happy shooters will love DotPhoto's low prices and its many discount plans. Standard prices start at 29 cents per 4x6 and $2.95 per 8x10. The company also offers 7 different monthly-subscription plans and 11 prepaid, bulk print packages, which can keep your costs at less than 20 cents per 4x6 and less than $2 per 8x10. And DotPhoto's uncommonly broad print-size range includes 3.5x5, 11x14, and even 12x18. You can even sell prints of your images using DotPhoto as an e-commerce platform. Despite the low prices, our DotPhoto test prints were equal in overall quality to those from nearly all the other sites we tested, and the company did the second-best job of fixing our problem images. The Web site is rougher around the edges than Ofoto and Shutterfly, however. There are no image-editing or -enhancing tools, and the online help consists mainly of an unindexed, five-page FAQ. DotPhoto isn't exactly pretty or refined, but it delivers good prints at very affordable prices. |
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3. EZ Prints | Editors' rating: 7.0 |
Pros: Large thumbnails and individual-image views; matte-paper option. Cons: Mildly confusing site; mediocre print quality. We found the EZ Prints Web site poorly organized and a bit slow to load, but despite those problems, the service is fairly flexible. Glossy and matte prints are available in sizes from 3.5x5 to 20x24, and you can individually address them to different delivery locations. Prints run 49 cents per 4x6 and $2.95 per 8x10. Buy multiple copies of a print, and you'll enjoy lower prices: 43 cents per 4x6 and $2.65 per 8x10. The site displays unusually large thumbnails and individual-image views, which made for the best online image quality we saw. Our test prints, however, were mediocre. Color accuracy and richness were good, but many shots were a bit too dark. |
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4. Fujifilm.net | Editors' rating: 7.8 |
Pros: Outstanding print quality; corrected problem images. Cons: Limited print sizes; site navigation needs improvement. Photo giant Fujifilm's online-printing arm, Fujifilm.net, isn't polished to quite the same gleam as Ofoto, but its print quality is excellent. The Web site is uncluttered and well labeled, but navigation, while no great chore, is occasionally frustrating. Viewing thumbnails of all the photos in an album, for example, takes too many clicks, and individual-image displays are a bit too small. The online help is extensive and clearly written, but when we e-mailed three questions to customer service, we got a canned offer to reprint any pictures we didn't like, rather than specific answers. Available print sizes are a bit limited--8x10 is the largest--but Fujifilm.net's prints were the best in our tests. Colors were quite vivid, and skin tones were pleasing. Alone among the sites we tested, Fujifilm.net also did a good job correcting our bad exposures and crummy white balance. Probably not coincidentally, Fujifilm.net's prices--49 cents per 4x6 and $4.29 per 8x10--are the highest overall in our test group. |
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5. Ofoto | Editors' rating: 7.6 |
Pros: Intuitive interface; red-eye-removal tool; lets you preview images in frame and greeting-card styles. Cons: Didn't correct problem images. One of online photo printing's pioneers, Ofoto was acquired by Kodak almost two years ago. Considering that pedigree, it's no surprise that Ofoto is a full-featured, highly polished service. The entire process--from uploading photos to ordering prints--is well orchestrated, and the site walks you through each step without a hitch. Several online editing options are at your disposal, including red-eye removal and a Photoshop-like cropping tool that's one of the best we've seen. Ofoto also sells dozens of frame and greeting-card styles, and you can quickly preview a picture in any one of them--a great feature. Ofoto offers a wider range of print sizes than many sites: 4x6 to 20x30. Our test prints were very good, with vivid colors and excellent skin tones, though Ofoto did a lousy job correcting our problem images. Charging 49 cents per 4x6 and $3.99 per 8x10, Ofoto is also on the pricey side, but you get a well-designed site and generally excellent prints for your money. |
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6. PhotoAccess | Editors' rating: 7.0 |
Pros: Flexible image sorting; displays several thumbnail sizes. Cons: Unintuitive, slow site; prints showed minor skin-tone problems. Although PhotoAccess offers some uncommon features, including flexible image sorting and several thumbnail sizes, the site struck us as overcomplex, and in our tests, it was also quite slow to load. On the plus side, its individual-image view is the only one that rivals EZ Prints' in size and clarity. We noted some minor skin-tone problems, but overall, our test prints had accurate, saturated colors. At 45 cents per 4x6 and $3.49 per 8x10, however, PhotoAccess's prices fall at the high end. |
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7. Printroom | Editors' rating: 7.6 |
Pros: Wide print-size selection; matte-paper option; image enhancements are optional. Cons: Site was sometimes poky. Printroom will please many advanced shooters. You get a broad range of print sizes--up to 20x30 inches--and you can have prints made on glossy or matte paper; many sites offer glossy only. And, as with Shutterfly, you can opt out of the image enhancements. The site itself is attractive and works reasonably well though sometimes a bit slowly. Our test prints were well exposed with rich colors. Happily, Printroom's good-quality prints and extra flexibility are available at midrange prices: $39 cents per 4x6 and $2.99 per 8x10. |
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8. Shutterfly | Editors' rating: 8.2 |
Pros: Outstanding preview function; nice album view and slide-show features; image enhancements are optional. Cons: Pricier prints. Shutterfly combines the clean, well-designed site of an industry veteran with good support for more-advanced photographers and enticing bulk-printing discounts. While not integrated as well as Ofoto, the site is generally a pleasure to use, and its excellent preview function lets you quickly see how images will look at any print size. We were also impressed with the exceptionally nice album view and slide show that your friends and family will see when you invite them to check out your pics. Our Shutterfly test prints were among the best. They show rich, accurate colors, and the service appears to have applied some corrections to our problem images, though these weren't very effective. If you're a tweaker who likes to fine-tune pictures in Photoshop, you'll be happy that Shutterfly gives you the option to print without image enhancements, such as sharpness and contrast adjustment; many online photofinishers apply these automatically. At 49 cents per 4x6 and $3.99 per 8x10, Shutterfly's prices are at the high end, but the company offers prepaid bulk plans that can reduce your costs to 29 cents per 4x6. |
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9. Snapfish | Editors' rating: 7.8 |
Pros: Excellent print preview; you can upload TIFF, GIF, and BMP images. Cons: Prices are on the high side. Its puzzling name aside, Snapfish offers good print quality and flexible pricing. We especially like the site's print preview, which shows you exactly how your photo will be cropped for printing. The well-organized user-account page shows credits, orders, and other account information. Unlike most sites, Snapfish will let you upload TIFF, GIF, and BMP images, in addition to JPEG files. Snapfish's print quality ranked among the best in our tests. Standard-print prices are a bit high--39 cents per 4x6 and $3.79 per 8x10--but the prepaid bulk packages can bring down those rates to as low as 25 cents per 4x6. |
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10. Walmart.com's Photo Center | Editors' rating: 7.6 |
Pros: Low prices; quality prints. Cons: Shopping cart doesn't display thumbnails; didn't correct problem photos. Walmart.com's Photo Center offers great prices and a functional but no-frills site. It's easy to manage your online albums, share them with friends and family, and order prints. But the shopping cart doesn't display thumbnails, so you have to remember filenames to know what pictures you're about to print. And the online help, though clearly written, just barely covers the basics. Still, at 26 cents per 4x6 and $2.89 per 8x10, Walmart.com's prices are hard to beat, and you can pick up your order at your local Wal-Mart store if you'd like to save shipping costs. Despite the low rates, our test prints were top-notch, which was no surprise after we'd learned that Walmart.com uses the same Fujicolor processing labs as Fujifilm.net. However, the problem shots that Fujifilm.net fixed so well went completely uncorrected at Walmart.com. Neither service would comment on this, but one possibility is that Fujifilm.net's more-expensive prints go through a more-rigorous quality-control check. |
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Eamon Hickey is a frequent contributor to CNET Reviews.
