Printing Snaps of Fish

(or The joys of online photo printing services)

I recently tried snapfish - partly because Picasa lists them, but more because they've recently been acquired by HP.

The experience has been mixed, but first some background to put my experience into context.

The Usual background Experiences

We have an Epson Stylus Photo R300 for printing stuff at home, and it's very good. Downsides are the speed and consumable costs, but then the latter is what enables Epson to churn out good product like the R300 at under a ton.

We also have a reasonable local photofinishers in the high street (within walking distance) that can do a good job of printing from various flash memory devices. But, the fact that it doesn't spring up on google (and therefore has no on-line presence that I can find ;-) and that it recently rebranded from Kodak to Agfa at apparently just the wrong time, although probably unfair labels, do sum the place up fairly well.

On-line, Boots has done us very well. They have good client side software, fast service, reasonable pricing, and the one time I had a complaint (prints that for some reason were solid black) they sorted it fast.

Fishy Snap Experience

So, using Boots as a benchmark, how did the significantly cheaper Snapfish stack up?

First attempt: although a pain to upload (no client-side software) a set of 6x4 prints from some sample files, went well, looked good, and arrived quickly. Good first impression.

Second attempt: mixed 6x4, 7x5, 10x8, 30x20. The mixed 6x4, 7x5, 10x8 arrived quickly and looked good except the 10x8s had been cropped big time. I'd half expected this, because the Snapfish service didn't have a 'scale-to-fit' / 'crop-to-fit' option like other services I'd tried. For some reason I assumed a sensible 'scale-to-fit' default. How silly. The 30x20 also didn't arrive when the email notification said it would. Not so good second impression.

So, my acid test for services, how well do they deal with problems?

First I tried the customer service web form. A week later, no response. So, not wanting to give up too easily, I searched the site and found a service email address and sent off a query. Within 24hrs I had a response with:

• a credit for the 10x8s
• an explanation of how to fix the cropping issue (which didn't work, until I figured out that they assume you use IE & not Firefox. Use IE and you 'magically' get extra options, including crop and preview, and a faster way to upload too)
  
• an explanation that a server problem had delayed the 30x20s, the order had been 'resubmitted' (and indeed the order arrived the day after the snapfish response)

Not bad, except, it appears from the mail headers that they might have spread my personal info around a bit too far for my liking in the process. In addition, I'm getting a smile from the mail delivery failures being notified from hp.com addresses. We'll see what they have to say...

Footnote

I also tried colab as I'd have good experiences of good quality conventional 35mm processing. Bad experience from the start. The client-side software was awful, hard to use, slow and eventually crashing; and I declined their suggestion of sending unencrypted credit card details in a .rtf formatted order form via email. Come on guys,this stuff ain't that hard.

Update: July 22, 2005

Snapfish have responded with "Thank you for your message. We have forwarded it to the appropriate department for their response. They will contact you soon. Please be aware that we will be working to respond to you as quickly as possible."

Update: August 2, 2005

After some back and forth, Snapfish claim the problem is nothing to do with them. They're pointing the finger at my mail provider saying the spurious mail addresses must have been in the original email I sent. The frustrating thing is I have a copy of exactly what they received because the snapfish mailservers helpfully returned a copy of it as part of the mail delivery failures they kept sending. But, as they say, life's too short to worry, I thought I was helping them find a problem, it appears they prefer ignorance .

FWIW Snapfish == good product, questionable systems, treat with care.

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Scanning Time

Nik very kindly lent me a scanner, it's a Canon CanoScan FS4000US. I've thrown a couple of films at it, some 35mm neg and some APS but as yet no transparency. The anti-scratch and dust busting algorithms work well and the workflow into PhotoShop is reasonable, if not amazing. So far the results are good, but there's a big catch:

it's slow, real slow.

Although the scanner is capable of 4000dpi, I've been scanning at 2000dpi which gives a 2944 x 2000 pixel image for standard format 35mm (just under 17Mb or nearer 8Mb on average when JPEG compressed). Rather than make a cupa tea while waiting between scans, I've been going shopping, to the summer party, or for a paddle down the canal. Scanning APS is bearable, but anything cut into strips is long and laborious process. So, like I guess many others before me, rather than converting my old negs into digital files in one big bang; I'll be doing the task piecemeal. Scanning a film on the side while doing some other imagery thing. It'll also mean getting my own scanner since, kind as he is, I doubt Nik will take kindly to me hanging on to his for a couple of years [1].

There's a lesson here for my digital archive: I need to make sure that both images and meta data can be easily and automatically transferred to new storage mediums.

Anyway, here's an example scan from an APS, it's skiing in Austria circa Feb 2000.

...and if you can get a decent idea of the scan quality by the time it's been resampled down to display in a web page and JPEG'd to save bandwidth, be thankful.


footnotes

[1] the scanner's going back in the morning ;-)