Just Uber

Recently I noticed that I’ve been amassing photos on my flickr account and not really doing anything with them. Its all very well to chronicle my sons growth from a baby into a little boy - but no fun if I can’t show the piccies to non-computer-using Gran.

I’d had a look around, but couldn’t find any photo printers by recommendation so I decided to give one a go and report my findings. The only requirements being that the uploading tool/website had to work with Linux, and the printing had to be consistently inexpensive.

Enter online photo printing company Pixdiscount. They’re based in Europe (France) and cheap as chips so I thought I’d give them a try.

First of all I was impressed by the fact their browser based uploading tool worked on linux without issues. I had visited a couple of other sites first which required the download of a Windows only app, or employed dodgy activex stuff or poorly written java that wouldn’t work.

The order was entered into the Pixdiscount site early hours of Mon Apr 9th with promises of my order being processed within 4 working days (although this actually refers only to the pictures being printed, the time taken for delivery with be longer).

The order was split into two sections:

1 of 18″ X 12″ poster at £5.50 plus delivery at £2.99:
Total £8.49

6 of 6″ x 4″ prints at £0.01 ea 24 of 6″ x 4.5″ prints at £0.08 ea (which was refunded due to this being a first order) plus delivery at £1.49 and a photo index at £0.69:
Total at £2.24

Jolly cheap I’m sure you’d agree!

Friday 13th (oooh er missus…), 5 days after placing the order, my 18″ X 12″ poster was delivered by Parcel Force.

Packaged in a strong cardboard box it arrived unscathed and unmarked. Quality was absolutely great, the poster was printed on good quality Kodak paper and the colour reproduction was spot on. Absolutely no complaints there.

For the price, I can highly recommend this option if you need a photo blowing up to poster size. Mounted in a glass frame, my new picture of my little boy will look great in my home.

Thursday 19th April - Smaller standard sized photos arrived. Again, well packaged and printed on quality Fuji paper.

All in all, it looks like PixDiscount provides a reasonable service at a rather cheap cost. Delivery of the smaller photos could have happened a little quicker, but given the inexpensive cost, I was happy to wait.

Oh, and just as a bootnote. Those crappy phone camera pictures you thought you’d never do anything with. At this price, get them printed on photo paper (There where a few phone camera shots amongst the small photos I had done). You’ll be surprised but they look better on paper than on screen (about the same quality as a dodgy disposable camera) and some are worth salvaging for the photo album.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.