Arubalou

Ive had good results with my local walgreens

jacklewis014

I agree - Walgreens has become my go to spot especially for larger prints (11x14)

Country Boy Loc: Beckley, WV

My SAMS Club does a good job but I normally get 4x6 prints and a few 5x7s but they look fine.

CanonTom Loc: Birmingham

All of you on this thread are encouraging me to try Costco! Stan, in your comment above a portion reads as follows: "I get the a profile from them so my monitor will match the prints."

I assume this means they give you something that helps you to calibrate your monitor to their printer......please explain in more detail....this is quite interesting and I am not fully following you. Thanks! Tom

nimbushopper Loc: Tampa, FL

I use Sam's too. The product is good quality but the help is useless!

Kmgw9v Loc: Miami, Florida

All stores are not the same.
My Walgreens produces terrible prints.

bkyser Loc: Fly over country in Indiana

I printed my daughter's senior photos at Sam's just to check them out. I color matched the borders, and downloaded their profiles.

First, no 2 photos came out with the same color border, even though I checked the do not color correct box.

I had to take them back 3 times, and after the third trip, I just gave up on getting the borders to match. The manager agreed to let me redo the photos without the border (faux mat as it were) They were "acceptable" so I just took them home. It took less than 2 years for her photos to fade and take on a green tint.

I do get proofs done at Costco, and haven't had any issues with them, but I charge enough for my prints that I send out to a lab that I trust will stand behind the prints and will take care of issues if the photos were to fade on the wall. Another side of that is perception. If you are charging for your photos, do you want someone to accidently see you picking up their expensive prints at Costco?

As Cliff recently reminded me, no, we aren't just selling ink and paper, but that still doesn't change the perception of people seeing you pick up a $2 8x10, that you are selling for $100.

f8lee Loc: New Mexico

Actually, this belies is an incorrect understanding of printer resolution - you (and many others) have been taken in by marketing BS.

The "1440-2880" number you see Epson and others claim is not a measure of the printer's resolution, but rather a claim based on the microscopically sized droplets of ink the print head s capable of producing. The actual printer driver - that is, the program that converts the input to the printer into the actual mechanical specifications that the print head itself performs - is far lower. The print head in your Epson printer does not increment across the page at a rate corresponding to 2880 dpi - nor is the platen capable of moving the paper in the 'portrait' direction at those tiny increments either. The actual native mechanical resolution for Epson (as I recall) is 360 dpi - or perhaps 720 dpi for the smaller format printers.

Oh, and the reason Costco is so often cited may be because some (not all) of their stores use the Fuji Frontier line of printers, which use normal color wet process photo paper (exposed by laser, I think) - that come out with very good results.

When you send an image to the printer - any digital printer, be it dye-sub, inkjet, laser or LED (as some of the half million dollar printers that expose photographic paper to LED light to generate the image are) the printer driver converts what you send to the native format of that printer. If you send it an image with a 120, 288, 407 or any other dpi resolution the driver has to convert it to the printer's native resolution in order for the machinery to do its thing. Back in the 1990's, when Canon made a color laser copier called th CLC, there were a few third party computer interfaces to it that enabled printing - those were the printing drivers.

The point is - 720 dpi is about the finest mechanical resolution a printer can give (the Kodak dye sub printers I owned years back had a native resolution of 301 DPI) - it was the marketing departments of these companies that decided to make the white lie that they "printed" at 1440 dpi - not because the mechanism can actually increment that precisely, but because the ink droplets were tiny enough to claim such. And the smaller ink droplets can make a different, in that they can blend more smoothly to create the actual colors seen on the paper.

JohnD3 Loc: Raleigh, NC

Just recently used Costco for the first time, found their photo printing to be superior and their pricing to be excellent. I found their product to be superior to the Walgreens and Walmart I had used previously, I will definitely be using them for all my future prints.

Skiextreme2 Loc: Northwest MA

Many people confuse DPI with PPI. Read below and note the differences -

Pixels Per Inch (has to do with the quality of the photograph)

Let's start with PPI, it's easy to understand. This is the number of pixels per inch in your image. This will affect the print size of your photo and will affect the quality of the output. The way that it will affect the quality of the output is that if there are too few pixels per inch, then the pixels will be very large and you will get a very pixelated image (jagged edges, you will actually see individual pixels, not good). You'll hear various different numbers thrown around as to what an acceptable PPI for a print-out is. A lot of this will depend on the size of the print. This is because you look at large prints from a further distance than a small print, so you can get away with a lower PPI and still have the image look fine.

All that PPI does is affect the print size of the image. There are 2 ways that you can change the print size, by resampling or by not resampling. Not resampling is what you normally want to do, this will only change the size of the print. Using resampling will actually change the number of pixels (and thus the file size) in order to match the print size. So for instance, if you don't resample, changing the PPI setting will increase or decrease the print size (it will increase if you drop the PPI, it will decrease if you increase the PPI). With resampling, if you change the PPI, you will loose pixels (if you set the PPI to a lower value) or you will have pixels created (if you increase the PPI). Creating pixels is a bad idea, they get generated by the computer and the results aren't usually that good. Throwing away pixels is fine as long as you won't need the bigger size later (that's why it's usually a good idea to save the original large file).

Dots Per Inch (has to do with the amount of ink used when printing)

Now let's talk about DPI. DPI only refers to the printer. Every pixel output is made up of different coloured inks (usually 4-6 colours, although many printers use more now). Because of the small number of colours, the printer needs to be able to mix these inks to make up all the colours of the image. So each pixel of the image is created by a series of tiny dots (you could think of them as sub-pixels). Generally, the higher the DPI, the better the tonality of the image, colours should look better and blends between colours should be smoother. You'll also use more ink and the print job will be slower. You might want to try setting your printer to a lower DPI to save ink and speed up the job, see if you notice any difference in quality. The lowest setting where you don't see any loss in quality should be the best one to use.

So a 1200 dpi printer uses 1200 dots of ink in every inch to make up the colours. If you were printing a 300 PPI image, then every pixel would be made up of 16 smaller ink dots (1200 DPI x 1200 DPI / 300 PPI x 300 PPI). A lower DPI would have fewer ink dots making up each pixel, which would make the colour look worse. A higher DPI would have more ink dots for each pixel and should give more accurate colour (especially under close examination).

More reading about this at: https://www.andrewdaceyphotography.com/articles/dpi/

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

(Apples and strawberries.)

cyclespeed Loc: Calgary, Alberta Canada

Wow! Almost 6 prints for only a penny, fantastically low prices. No wonder everyone uses Costco.
Can you help me understand what "get the profile from them so my monitor will match the prints"? Aren't the prints supposed to match what you send TO them not the other way around?
Thanks for the explanation.

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

Toby

Costco is not like the corner drugstore. Their quality is very good, price is excellent and if they run out of ink that's their problem. I do shoot primarily sports and scenery. Occasionally I will send portraits to a lab. If I have a problem at Costco it has always been corrected with a smile.

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

This info is what I have heard.