Lately, I’ve been testing two competing photo printers : Photobox (aka as Photoways) and Snapfish.

Let me start by saying I used to be a faithful Photobox client for 5 years. I’ve always thought they rates were a bit expensive but they (used to) have a very good printing quality for what I call everyday pictures (I exclude B&W from this). Their books are also a very good product and I made several good gifts out of them.

Until 18 months ago.

I don’t know what happened in their photo labs or if they changed their printers settings but since then I’ve had 2 batches totally ruined, one of them containing 57 pics printed with a reddish tint that made everyone look like they had measles. For christmas, I had ordered a deluxe calendar that was supposedly shipped on dec. 17 (marked as “delivered on time for christmas”) then lost, then reprinted. It finally arrived… yesterday.

I tried to have the measles batch reprinted, but it took me so many emails and discussions that I finally gave up. I was asked to fax my request and then send by snail mail the whole bunch of prints (at my expense) to just get the case opened in their CMS. This “case” is still unsettled. You people at Photobox really do everything you can to dissuade your customers.

So I turned to HP’s Snapfish. First, I love what HP does with Magcloud. Second, I could print 50 pics for free to test it.

It turns out Snapfish is really great. The upload tool is simple, web embedded and does not require you to install any stand-alone tool on your machine. Yet it allows you to upload as many pics as you want at a time and it resumes broken (or interrupted) uploads as well. Bandwidth seems good (though I live in the countrysite and have a very slow connection). Snapfish can also link to your Flickr account, a very good idea to save time and avoid spending hours uploading what you already have.

But what I like the most is the collage prints and posters. On a 10×15 cm print, you can mix up to 20 photos and stuff more pictures on one print. I use this a lot because I have trouble deciding which photos to print or not, and also because I have series of pictures that tell a little story. Great tool for that!

Here is an example of a recently printed 50x75cm poster:

The poster arrived 4 days after I ordered it, neatly packed in a cardboard tube and with beautiful color and contrast rendering (by the way be sure to UNCHECK the “auto-correct” option box – french version – when you order your prints, the auto correct… well doesn’t correct really well :)

Oh and did I mention that with each order you usually get a discount for the next one?

Bye bye Photobox, Hello Snapfish!