photobox & FOTO.com

DaireQuinlan

Hi all.

I recently send a bunch of pics off to photobox and foto.com (having gotten the two places from the boards here ). Sent the same 10 pictures off to both of them. Now I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I absolutely loved the quality of the prints from photobox, matched exactly what was on the monitor (after some rudimentary calibration involving the photobox calibration print & adobe gamma) and I like that you can request zero adjustments to the pictures, put them in sRGB, delete the EXIF data and they'll get printed exactly as you send them.

FOTO.com was a bit of a bind though. I wasn't satisfied with the prints at all. There were two major flaws. First one was it looked as though they'd run a really aggressive sharpening over the pictures, to the point were there were actual speckles on some of the prints (which are not in the originals but which I can repro in PS by oversharpening). Secondly it looks as though they upped the contrast rather drastically on them aswell, so that on one or two of the prints in particular (that are fine from the photobox prints) the detail is washed out in the highlights and lost in the shadow areas.

The big bind is the price though. 12x8 , 75c on FOTO , 3.99 on Photobox ! if the difference wasn't as much I wouldn't hesitate, But I'm considering how to actually adjust my pictures in order that they'll look as intended when printed by FOTO.

Anybody else had any similar experiences ? any alternative online photo services that people would recommend ? I guess both good quality and cheap are a bit exclusive !

D.

B0rG

send them exactly the same message over the email.
people like oversharp, +10 contrast, +10 brightness, that's what they sell in every print house on Grafton St, same you get from major photo publisher.

After all isn't the customer supposed to be right all the time?

Roen

Ya gets what ya pays for.

JMcL

I've recommended Foto on a number of occasions here, but I got a batch of 12x8s done a couple of weeks ago (they were doing a promotion price of 25c), and was less than happy.

The order took really long to turn around - processing took almost a week (that's before being posted). Worse, from what I can make out they didn't print everything I uploaded. Their upload applet has some sort of "quality" indicator, and was complaining of a night shot I'd done of Kilkenny cathedral. They didn't indicate why they thought it wasn't of sufficient quality, the only reason I can think of is that it's not the most tonally rich image. When I got the prints, there was no sign of this one. Unfortunately, given that I'd uploaded a load of images, I can't say for sure whether that one actually did upload, so I can't really shout about it.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the moment, but will probably check out Photobox as well

DotOrg

go to your local photo development place, if you get lots of 12x8s printed they should be able to give you a deal with will beat photoboxes deal, maybe not beat foto.com but you'll be able to ask about quality and get them back much quicker than any mail order place

i do 12x8's for some of my customers in less than a 1 hour service at a photobox beating price

ladgie353

Did you send a mail to FOTO.com asking for an explanation?

I got a set of 12x8s done recently and they're fine.
Did you sharpen the pictures before sending them?

DaireQuinlan

No, I didn't actually send a mail or anything. I'd sharpened them a little before sending them to both photobox and FOTO , the photobox pics were as they were onscreen, the FOTO ones had (I suspect) been sharpened some more, quite aggressively. I'd sent the two sets of images as a compare and contrast to the two services. The most important thing to me is that I can establish that the prints will look exactly (well, within reason !) the same as on my monitor, which I know is a tall order, and that the process is consistent. Photobox seems to have performed the best job. The problem with FOTO wasn't that they were consistently darker or brighter, but that they'd obviously run some pre-processing over the images before printing them. Theres no sign photobox did this. I guess I can send another test batch to FOTO with a note requesting no alterations and see what happens. Honestly, if it wasn't for the price I wouldn't even bother. I -have- sent them emails querying exactly this sort of stuff before I sent the initial batch , and got no reply. the Photobox support on the other hand, seems prompt and friendly.

Has anyone ever got stuff printed up on that Fujifilm place on Georges street (Dublin) ? Do they have one of those frontier machines ? Anyone got profiles or calibration prints from them ?

D.

DaireQuinlan

Well, as suggested above I fired off an email to FOTO querying the quality of the prints :

Hi, I got an order from FOTO recently, 10 pictures. I had them processed in photobox aswell, for comparison. I was a little dissatified with the quality of the FOTO prints. My monitor is reasonably calibrated , the photobox prints came back almost exactly as I had expected. The FOTO prints however
looked as though a lot of pre-processing had been applied to them, namely a
quite aggressive sharpening pass (which caused speckles on some of the images) and the contrast had been increased quite a bit, blowing out the highlights and losing detail in some of the shadow areas of the prints.

Is there a way to ensure that -no- adjustments are made to the images
prior to printing ?

I got the following rather badly spelled form reply ...

Dear Customer,

We are sorry to ear that you are not satisfied of your product.
For a refund or a free reprint, we need a scanner from one photo sent by FOTO.com. Attach that scanner with its original Jpeg to this e-mail so that we can compare and edit your order.

Kindest Regards,
FOTO.COM

So i've fired off another email looking for qualification on the no adjustments question (which really was the only one I actually WANTED answered !) but I don't expect much.

D.

peckerhead

I recently tried Pixdiscount.ie (based in France) and was well pleased — their prices knock the socks off both foto.com and photobox.ie, especially for larger sizes:

Pixdiscount:
16"x12" €3.90 + €3.00 'processing charge' + free postage = €6.90
18"x12" €3.90 + €3.00 'processing charge' + free postage = €6.90

Photobox:
16"x12" €11.99 + €2.50 p&p = €14.49
18"x12" €13.50 + €2.50 p&p = €16.00

Am just waiting for a sufficiently nice sharp pic off my old 5Mp Fuji to merit blowing up that big...:o