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Getting Prints Made From Digital Cameras?
schussat asks: "Now that I have a digital camera, I'm looking for a good company to produce prints (I know, some say prints are obsolete, but it's nice to be able to hold a photo once in a while). Do you guys have some favorite sites that make high-quality prints? What about Linux support? I've found that PhotoWorks, which I have long used for 35mm film prints, does not yet support Linux uploading at all; Shutterfly on the other hand has a Linux GTK uploader client. Are there others that folks would recommend?"
I think my local meijers (a large grocery store)
lets you bring in a flash card and they will print out disant pics.
I used Kodak Photonet with some success. Note that this is not the same thing as the link off Kodak's site, which is some horrible system that requires IE.
You upload your images to Kodak with either a input type="file" widget in a form or by supplying a url of the image (I did the latter). Select the print size and number of copies, give them your CC info and viola in a couple weeks you'll get your prints in the mail.
The cost is fairly low. My only complaint was that the prints were too dark, even though they looked good on my monitor (probably because I jack the gamma up for playing quake). While you are waiting for your prints they have a convenient system for status checking.
I submitted various 640 x 480 pics taken with an old Sanyo camera.
The results were quite good.
For a 4" print, minimum resolution should be 640 x 480, higher would be better. Also the lossines of the jpg file (I send some with various levels of compression) plays a role. You can easily see artifacts on highly compressed or economy mode pictures. My 640x480 pics were about 65k in size and the quality of the pics were excellent. They print the pictures on kodak paper, so it is i.e. a photograph and will last just like one (no ink fade etc.)
I think they charge about $0.40 a print, plus S&H (2.50).
You can also preview your pictures in various frames, and order them too.
You might browse lists of photo sharing sites, such as this one at AmateurPhoto.About.Com. I looked at two, and see that PhotoLoft.Com allows browser or email upload, and there's a "Store" for creating gifts which involve your photos.
I then looked for a similar page on Yahoo!: Yahoo! ... Photography and found that ImageStation.Com allows several upload methods and has a "Store" which can apparently make prints (based on the price list in the upper left corner). Plenty of unexplored sites there, although many are professionally oriented. And "Yahoo! Photos" requires IE so is useless.
Note that now that you have the name of several services which meet your needs, you could now search for pages which list all those sites and you might find indexes which list more. Yup, a MetaCrawler search of "Imagestation PhotoLoft" (omit the quotation marks) found several photo service index pages.
I know my local Wal-Mart includes jpgs and (I think) targa files in their list of "supported media" that you can bring in to have printed up. They accept images on cd-r, floppies, and flash cards, as well as an email address you can send photos to (you have to ask for this one, and set up arrangements beforehand)
.30c/image, plus $9.99/disk. If you bring in a stack of floppies they can really clean you out pricewise. It pays to organize the images onto a cd-r.
You may be surprised as just how fast the various "1 hour" photo shops have adapted to new tech. Their processing machines already convert most pictures into a digital format of some sort, and spit out a high quality ink print, rather than true photo paper. (unless you pay a lot, *and* use 3+ day photo processing, even then you may have to specifically ask for true photos -- if they do 'em at all)
Just be careful of the price. I've seen shops that will do
All the camera shops here, the ones that do digital, and actually know what they're talking about, will do prints from CF, SmartMedia, CD, whatever. Most new cameras even support DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) so you can specify the order and which prints you want done and it's done electronically (onto standard paper). Polaroid also sells a printer (for about $100) which accepts Polaroid prints (I know I know) and actually "exposes" them with whatever image you send to the "printer".
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
If my word is not enough, please check out this testimonial. I think it's very compelling in its own right.
As for labs, again, colorimaging.com comes very highly regarded, although I have not used them. Chances are if you are seriously looking into Iris prints and you find a lab that can actually afford one, then they are probably well-established enough that you can trust them to produce quality output.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
there's several photoshops that allow uploading of pics for printing. In a recent survey by the dutch newspaper AD what was chosen as the best place to send your pics was Foto Baron. Uses php to process everything. And has been working without problems for more than a few months. will also work with linux.
Disclaimer: I wrote the php stuff, but am not otherwise affiliated with foto baron or digitalefoto.nl. I am also NOT responsible for the content of the site, so don't whine to me about flash
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I've just bought an Epson Stylus Photo 870, and the quality is pretty much indistinguishable from a print.
You can get 6" by 4" paper for it with tear off edges. The print bleeds onto the tear off strips, so that when they are removed you have edge to edge print.
I've printed 1100x800ish scanned photos at A4 size, and the quality still holds.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I *HIGHLY* reccommend Shutterfly. I have been using them for a few months now. They have developed about 5 rolls of film for me, and I've also uploaded many digitally-created drawings & CGI to them, and had them all printed to 4x6's, and/or 8x10s. the quality is superb, service is excellent (they answer email in the same day), and the website is quite easy to use.
You can upload directly though the browser, so it is quite platform independent.
35mm Film development is free, they even pay to ship the roll there, and to send you the negatives back.
http://www.perceive.netwww.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
I've used the following:
Printroom.com
A coworker of mine had prints developed from several different print houses. Ofoto and Shutterfly seem to be the best, with a slight edge in color accuracy to Ofoto.
Here are some things I have learned from using various sites:
www.ofoto.com
www.cartogra.com
www.shutterfly.com
photos.yahoo.com
As others have mentioned, OPhoto.com is very good. I ordered prints from my Mavica the week before Christmas and got very good service. The 4x6's and 8x10's came out VERY nice. You don't NEED any special software to upload your photos. Your Netscape will do the job just fine.
Try a local smaller photo lab, like the one I work at, Oregon Photo. We do prints up to 8x10 using a Kodak dye-sub printer on glossy paper. The result is honestly really good, but of course it all depends on the quality of the file. We take them on floppy, zip or CD. They run about a dollar per print for 4x6. Larger chains like Wolf Camera probably do them also. I'd stay local for better service.