printing problems... Please Help!

[algamag]

I have a canon sd100 and the when I download the prints to my computer, they look great--even when I zoom in... I wanted to get some prints made and so I took them to motophoto today, after deleting all the prints from my SD card and then uploading all the prints that I wanted to have printed.. The biggest problem was that when I got the prints back, they look very pixely, very digitalized (they were only 4 x 6 though).. Could it be a problem with uploading the prints back onto my SD card? Would it make any difference if I saved them onto a CD and then brought them in? I am using Canon Zoom Browser software..

The other problem was that all the vertical prints that I took were cropped, printed in a horizontal layout, so that the middle of the print was there, but instead of the top and bottom being there, it is just black on both sides of the print.. The technician said that it was something to do with my card and the way i had formatted the pictures, so i couldn't get them refunded..

This is the second time i have had these two problems.. what am I doing wrong? All these mistakes are getting expensive!

Thanks for the help!

[Jon]

Did you have "auto-rotate" set on the camera? And did you possibly also rotate the images either in Explorer or Zoom Browser? If yes to both, the automatic printer might have applied the auto-rotate to an already-rotated picture. Was the width of the actual picture portion of the rotated images 4"?

Were the pixellated pictures the full images or just a portion of them? If they were the full pictures, and you hadn't done any editing or re-saving, they should not have been pixellated. If you edited and re-saved them, your JPEG save settings might have caused extra compression, which, since it's "lossy" could result in color-banding and blocky images.

Did you press the technician for exactly what the problem was? If he's not willing to identify something specific, then he could just be making excuses.

Some places have printing machines where you can load and preview the pictures yourself. You might want to try using one of these machines and see if you have better success. If you do, then you can be reasonably sure that it's MotoPhoto.