Best Place for Digital Prints

[dajedikidd]

I printed my first set of prints from my A75 at Meijer and was very pleased with the results. Even pics that looked a bit fuzzy on the computer came out clear and the color looked good. I went back yesterday to do some additional prints, and the machine was down. Since I needed the prints right away, I went to Walgreens. I was not impressed. They looked like they were printed on an OK home printer. The color was way off, skin tone was kinda orange and blacks were horrible. Some of the prints were the same as the ones I printed at Meijer, and it was like night and day. One persons black jacket was just a big blob of pure black on the Walgreen's prints whereas the Meijer print was more 'shades of gray' like it should have been where you could see every wrinkle and color variation in the jacket.

Anyway, what I was wondering, does anyone know which companies use which printing machines and which ones you feel give the best results in case I run into broken machines in the future?

Thank you.

[Scottes]

I would take a batch of 6 or 10 prints to a few shops in your area and do a trial run. Tell every one of them to make sure they don't do any color correction (and make sure you save the color profile in each image). Compare the results and make judgement.

[kb244]

Hrm , My experience printing at meijer's typically come out with poor prints, they use these lil personal home printers behind the lil labs, and when you get the prints back you have banding, try asking them if its normal or not, usally come back with a "I dunno". I found that if you goto walmart or sam's you'll get the best prints for about the cheapest price (.28 per 4x6 at walmart, .18 cents a print at sam's), both locations uses Fuji Frontier Lab printers. The paper they use is a different question entirely most places, meijers, wallgreens, sam's, walmart, etc, they use whatever is the cheapest paper available to them, so one week you might get prints back on fuji paper, another on kodak, etc. But I've found that regardless of paper, any place that prints your digitals onto the fuji frontier keeps about the best consistancy in quality.

[dajedikidd]

Thank you very much, I will look into that.

[dajedikidd]

The Sam's Club prints came out great, and upon looking at them more closely, it seems that they were the closest to the original electronic file. Even though the Meijer prints looked good as well, it appears that they may have been over brightened. Thanks again for the help.

[PhotosGuy]

Some Walmarts have the good Frontier printers - some don't. You just have to ask which stores have them. It doesn't hurt to make a test print with a known white in it to check their color balance, too. If it's not right, then tell the operator. Some are better than others & you might have to talk to the manager.

[MT]

http://www.mpix.com