If you recall I was looking for a photo lab to send my photographs for large prints. My prints have arrived from Peak Imaging so I thought I would write a little about my experience with them.
First of all I criticised their usability. I still think their website is shockingly bad for a company who wants to attract professional clients. Having said that once you manage to find that you need to download an application and manage to install it the experience is a hell of a lot better. While not exactly lightweight, weighing in at 4mb, it does the job of selecting and uploading files just fine.
Prices on some of the prints are competitive. If pricing is important to you it is worth shopping around, most of the agressive price reductions are to be found on various competitors by mainly in the 6×4 sizing and usually after bulk purchases. I only wanted 5 prints just to test them out so while I could have saved 20p a print by going to photobox had I developed all of the prints I need eventually, by going with Peak just for the 5 I wanted to test I actually saved 65p (price per print £1.64 before VAT and delivery). Delivery is also an area to look at carefully, Peak have a flat fee of £2.10 including VAT for postage even though I only live 20 minutes away from their premises.
Obviously the most important thing is the quality of the prints. All I can compare against are the prints Damian had done at photobox and the professional digital portrait prints of my daughter taken by a local studio photographer. The results are no better for definition and clarity than Damians and noticeably not as good as the local photographers chosen service. Could be the source images, my equipment, etc. I am no expert in these things, quite the contrary.
My main disappointment is they have come out very dark. I was in such a rush to send off my images I didn’t do any calibration. “It’s ok” I thought “I will tick the ‘optimise’ option”. Well it turns out that their optimising doesn’t noticeably do anything.
Lesson learned, unfortunately I just wasted £12.
Would I use them again? Yeah I will. I will lighten my images up (after calibrating my monitors) and send them off for another attempt. I guess that is the best I can say, not a glowing endorsement but they have kept me as a customer for now which is the main thing right?
Technorati Tags: digital, photography, photo, developing
