Note: This test was conducted in November and December 2001.
I've been using Ofoto for several months, and have been generally happy with their service. But lately, I seem to find more and more prints that I don't like when they arrive in the mail. For 95% of these unsatisfactory prints, the image looks just fine on my computer screen. Which leads me to hope that these prints would come out just fine if printed by someone else! But who?
This was my starting point: Dave Dyer's Guide to Online Photo Albums. This guy has put together quite a large list (with opinions!) of online photo album services, some of which provide print services.
Listed below are my criteria, roughly in order of importance, for choosing a photo service. I'm including them because, obviously, everyone does not have the same needs. So my best choice may not be your best choice....
1) Print quality. Accurate color, fine detail are what I want. By far the most important thing for me.
2) Image / album sharing capability. This factors in any storage limitations imposed by the service provider. Are multiple albums allowed? Can I caption each picture if I want to? If a site offers substandard sharing features, it's not a deal-breaker for me, because I can build my own online photo albums and host them any number of places to show off my pics to friends & family. But it sure would be nice to be able to avoid the extra work involved!
3) Ease of uploading. The ideal site would have a well-designed drag-n-drop (DnD) interface for uploading image files. FTP would also be just fine with me. Browser uploading is a pain, especially when you want to upload 60-100 pictures in one sitting as I do, and so is almost unacceptable. The extra wrinkle here is that I'm a Mac user. Some service providers offer DnD only for PC users. :(
4) Price of prints. Not a huge factor for me, but all other things being equal, I'd much rather pay 19 cents per print instead of 59.
5) Ease of ordering. A minor consideration.
6) Speed of delivery. A minor consideration (within reason!).
The sites I tried were Ofoto (the incumbent :), Wal Mart, eFrames, Shutterfly, dot Photo, Club Photo, Snapfish, and PhotoAccess.
Ofoto and Shutterfly seemed like clones, from the site design to the website features (sharing, uploading, etc.) to the quality of the prints I got back. Everything about these two sites is great, except for the print quality. It seems as if they crank up the contrast on every image they print. It's not very noticeable (in fact, it may be a desireable effect) on images that have low contrast to start with, but becomes very obtrusive when observed on images with high contrast. Dark shades get darker, bright colors get more saturated, and most annoying, highlights get blown out and overbrightened. Some related effects in the Ofoto prints are a strange color distortion around areas where the CCD got saturated to true white, and the tendency for cooler skin tones, sometimes to the point of making the subject look ill. The skin tone problem also appeared, although to a lesser degree, in the Shutterfly prints. Print detail was excellent from both sites, and prices for both sites are .49 / .99 / 3.99 for 4x6 / 5x7 / 8x10 prints, respectively. Ofoto prints usually arrive about a week after ordering, and my Shutterfly prints arrived in just 6 days.
Wal Mart produced prints that were very good, not far at all behind the sites that produced the best-looking prints. Images seemed to have a very slight bluish tinge, but were very sharp. Price is excellent, at .26 / .96 / 2.86. Deal breakers for me though, were the obnoxious browser upload method (worse than usual because there's a limit of 5 images per upload), and the 30 day "expiration" of uploaded photos. If you want permanent image storage, you rent disk space for permanent albums. I didn't bother to figure out whether the lower print prices make up for the cost of the disk space I might want to buy. Or would I rather host the albums myself to save money? In the end, I gave up on them as too labor-intensive. (Their ordering process seemed rather cumbersome as well.) But at least the option for additional storage is there, if you want to take them up on it, unlike some other sites. Also unique to Wal Mart is the free shipping option, if you pick up your prints at your local store. Cool twist! I got an email notification 8 days after placing my order, stating that the photos were being shipped to the store of my choice. I picked them up a few days later.
dot Photo and eFrames prints both suffered from a strange lack of detail, as if all the pictures were taken through a diffusion filter (?) or something was just out of focus somewhere along the way. Pretty objectionable. There was also some color problem in the dot Photo prints -- they looked kind of flat overall. I had high hopes for dot Photo, as they give you free unlimited storage, 60 free prints initially, and $0.19 4x6 prints when you join their most basic subscription plan! (I don't remember what the online storage policy is for eFrames.) Further encouraging my optimism for dot Photo was the note on the page I mentioned at the top of this email, which rated their print quality as excellent. I guess that must have been on a good day? Non-subscription prices for dot Photo prints are .29 / .95 / 2.95, and arrival time for my order was 12 days. eFrames prices are .49 / .99 / 3.99, and my order arrived in 4 days! Oh yeah, I had to use the browser upload method for both of these sites, although dot Photo offers a DnD method for PC/IE users, and an unusual ability to accept photos via CD, Zip disk, flash memory card, etc. if you want to send the media to them in the mail! They don't send back CDs, but they do return the flash RAM devices to you. :) They also accept photos via email, which could be convenient for linux (or Mac OS X :) users who are comfortable with perl and such.
[Jan 29 2002 update: dotPhoto now offers upload via FTP as well. Smart move.]
Club Photo delivered prints that combined poor detail with exaggerated contrast. :( I don't remember what their storage policy is either. Prints are .45 / .99 / 3.99. Prints arrived in 9 days. They did provide a DnD upload facility for the Mac.
OK, the print quality winners (IMHO) were... Snapfish and PhotoAccess! Both returned excellent quality prints that didn't suffer from any of the problems observed with the other services' prints. Placing the prints side-by-side, my wife and I both agreed that the PhotoAccess prints were slightly better, but it was really a tie. The PhotoAccess website design is a bit quirky, but pretty good once you get used to it. The Snapfish prices are the steepest I could find, at .59 / .99 / 3.99, while PhotoAccess charges .45 / 1.09 / 2.95, as well as offering "digital size" prints, and slides(!). It's not surprising that both of these sites delivered prints of similar quality: they both use the Print@Kodak service to do their printing. The Snapfish order was delivered 8 days after placing the order; the PhotoAccess prints arrived in about a week as well. In the end, PhotoAccess got the thumbs-up because they offer free unlimited storage in as many photo albums as you want to create, the ability to caption the pictures, several levels of sharing privileges (view, view & print, view print & save), the ability to download your original high-res file, and a DnD utility for the Mac. In fact, they earn extra happy bonus points from me, because they have a Mac OS X Drag-n-Drop uploader in development! They're the only ones I found who mentioned native Mac OS X support. Snapfish offers very limited online storage, just 50 MB at a time. Ugh. To be fair though, their main thrust is to offer inexpensive and convenient developing of good ol' film. Snapfish offers a DnD capability for PC/IE users.
In summary, I was pretty surprised by the great variance in print quality I was able to see. The one big question that wasn't answered by this experiment though, is "How consistent is their quality?" Or in other words, "How different would the comparison results be if I do this again in a couple months?" I think that's something that you can only find out by ordering prints from a provider over an extended period of time. But I do know that quality control is lacking at some of them! I'm definitely going to use PhotoAccess until and unless I notice their quality decline. At which point I might throw up my hands and go back to film. :-) (yeah, right!)
One further note: This "free unlimited online storage" of your photos seems too good to be true. It'll be interesting to see if that offer is still available in a year. I wouldn't count on it. But, as long as it's there, I'm certainly going to take advantage of it!
As of October 2002, I continue to be very happy with the quality of the prints I've received from PhotoAccess. Their abum management software works very well also.
I am still very happy with the service that PhotoAccess provides. I have contacted customer service by email several times and have always gotten thorough and satisfactory responses. Their DnD uploader app for Mac OS X works quite well.
There have been some changes that I've noticed since I wrote this original report though, mostly in pricing of prints. I have not reordered test prints from any of these services to see if their print quality has changed though. As long as I'm happy with PhotoAccess, I don't see the need to do so. :)
Some time ago, Snapfish sent out an email stating that they had improved their printing process, and so are now able to pass along lower print prices to their customers. This is great news, since they were the most expensive when I did my first analysis. But, I hope for their sake that this "improved" printing process does not cause a decline in print quality, since they were already top-notch in my opinion. As I said, I haven't ordered any new test prints, so I can't say whether their print quality has improved or declined. Snapfish also has changed their online photo storage policy to make it much more generous (and competitive with the others). Assuming that their print quality has not declined, I would now view them on equal footing with PhotoAccess, if only they offered a DnD upload utility for Mac OS X! I've written to them to tell them as much -- we'll see what happens.Shutterfly has added a feature to their site which allows you to disable their image enhancement feature. This is good news because I'm pretty sure that's what was causing some of my Shutterfly and Ofoto prints to have an overly-contrasted look to them. The only problem is, it's not real easy to find the checkbox which disables the image enhancement.
It also seems that most of these companies have rolled out a volume discount plan for ordering 4x6 prints, which is great news for the consumer! Trying to summarize them all here would be rather difficult because the price breaks occur at different points for each provider, and prices may change in the future. So check them out yourself to see the details of their pricing!