In Praise of Print
Writing about: PhotoBox
Despite all the rush into digital imaging, I’m very much a fan of printing out images – the quality is always better in print than on screen, and you know that your paper copies will never crash, be accidentally deleted, become outdated or anything else.
Photobox is a website where you can upload your digital images, and they’ll print them on minilab printers (Fuji Frontier) – these are the same things that you’d get your photos printed on if you sent a film for processing. The quality is excellent, and the colour matching is perfect.*
Prints are 18p for a 6×4” print (the normal size), but you can get the price down to as little as 10p if you buy print credits. To put this in context, I recently printed 152 images at 6×4, at a cost of just over £18 (I bought 200 credits, which makes it 12p each) – this is slightly less than the cost per image for getting print film developed, and that doesn’t include the cost of film. When I shoot slide film, it costs 20p per slide all up, including film and processing.
The service from photobox is excellent. My order of 152 images was submitted on saturday night, printed on Monday, and arrived on Tuesday. If you order on a working day, they print on the same day.
The biggest problem with services such as photobox is that you really need to have broadband internet to upload any significant number of images to them. Each file from a modern digital camera will be in the region of 2Mb, and over a modem transferring that much data is painful.
All up, highly recommended.
* If you shoot in sRGB (i.e. most digital cameras, by default) it’ll be fine as is, if you use a wide gamut such as Adobe RGB (which I do) then you might want to get hold of the ICC profile from Dry Creek Photo which I’ve found to be very accurate). The files need to be sRGB before you upload them, though