Digital Photo Printing Service

Find a great digital photo printing service!

Once you've taken all the photographs you want to you'll probably be ready to get them reproduced and the number of digital photo printing services where you can obtain prints is huge. An online search reveals many different sources for digital photo printing, with many conglomerated into the same place on handy review sites found all over the internet. This brings up the question of how are you to choose the correct printing service to meet your needs?

Personally, I try to avoid the smaller looking sites, as well as those who don't specialize only in digital photo printing. Anyone with a large format printer can usually produce a generally acceptable digital photo print, but the quality may not be as good as the prints you get from a digital photo printing service specifically geared to photo printing. I used to work at a sign shop and although many times we were able to produce prints at a high level of quality to satisfy a casual customer, we generally outsourced any digital photo print that required a super high resolution for display purposes. This is the main reason that in your search for a digital photo printing service, you need not be concerned with which printer can print the largest photo size. If you find a printing service that for some reason or another won' t match standard print sizes, you may not wish to patronize them.

In order to test whether or not one digital photo printing service is better than another, I typically advise that my students get a few of the same test prints made at small size from more than one such service. These prints usually include (at a minimum) a black and white photo, a normal close-up or even macro-range photo, and photo of a sky with many colors, like those found at sunrise and sunset. By comparing the returned prints of the same photo, you will be able to determine which printer you like the best. It is also good to perform this test using a photo that you yourself shot, so that you can compare how the prints came out with respect to the original scene. For the professional digital photographer such as yourself, print quality is the most important factor in you choice of a digital photo printing service. The quality of your prints can make or break your portfolio presentation and really affect how a potential customer views your work.

Now that you're an expert at comparing print quality, you're ready to think about some other factors in determining the quality of a digital photo printing service. These include the amount of turnaround time it takes to get physical prints in your hands from when you ordered them, how easy it is to order prints, and how much customer support the printing service offers. The best digital photo printing services usually offer money back or replacements of unacceptable prints.