After recently seeing some pictures printed from an online store, I decided to do some research of my own and find a place to print my own. Being I am more of an artsy person, I get picky with things like photos, and paper, and style. The list goes on and on. After looking around a little bit I found out their is some correlation between photos and cutesy names.

I stumbled across sites like Shutterfly and Snap Fish, both of which I was referred to by others. What flies and fish have to do with photos, I am unsure. These two animals aren’t even photographed by the casual photographer all to often. I moved past those two services and still found myself finding sites like Winkflash. I guess this name took me a little closer to a logical name for a photo printing company, but winking still kinda wigs me out, especially if it were captured in a still. I finally landed on dotPhoto which seemed to sit most comfortably with me.

After I got past the naming schemes of these sites I thought I might take a look more seriously at what you might get from each service. While price was the most heavily weight reason for settling on a photo service, I think there are a couple of other things to look at as well. So, let throw the giants out the window (Walmart, Wallgreens, etc.) and lets move to these smaller sites.

Shutterfly

I have been recommended to Shutterfly numerous times and have seen some of their prints. They are a quality service. Coming in at 19¬¢ a print (for 4×6) they are tailing behind other printers. You can customize your prints right online by adding over 500 different borders. I didn’t see an option to get matte instead of glossy, but the highlight of this service for me, was they will store as many photos for free and you can even show a friend your collection online at any time in a nice gallery view. Shipping varies on how many prints you order, but for 24 prints it would be $2.49.

Winkflash

This service seems to be a bit of a baby amongst the others. While the site is okay and it has 12¬¢ a print, I am not sure about the quality of their product. While I am judging this simply by the design of their site, I think the quality of a site makes a big statement when you only have a web presence. I did see that you have an option for glossy or matte, but this service just doesn’t quite have as much to offer as some of the others. They also have a variable shipping cost ($1.99 to ship 24 prints).

Dot Photo

Dot photo comes comes in with a tie at 12¢ a print, though the site advertises lower then that throughout. There seems to be some membership you can join to get as low as 7.5¢ a print. There are limited options here and it is hard to find out about what they offer. While they have a great promotion (currently of 50 free prints) I have not tried this service. Shipping comes in at $3.99 for each order.

Snapfish

Snapfish is a great service. At 9¬¢ a print they come in at the lowest. There are no strings attached and no deals to be made. Althought, you do get your first 20 prints free. They do have an option for a white border, a torn border, or no border, but currently they only offer glossy prints. They are backed by Meijer (I know I said lets avoid the big wigs) and they offer a solid service. While they don’t have a viewing option like Shutterfly for other to see, they give you good prints at a good price. Once again with variable pricing, you will get 24 prints shipped for $2.46.

I am not sure you need to stick with one photo service. Shutterfly seems to be the only site that really matters long term, but at 19¢ they are almost double the other services. If you like to have your photos stored somewhere and like being able to show them off to other people, Shutterfly seems like the way to go. Snapfish seems like the best if all you need are some prints. I doubt that any place really gives you a sub par print, as companies have gotten the printing of photos down pretty pat, but I hope to see these services grow more this year and really give the user more options and maybe even lower pricing.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Muse, Ponder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.