Snapfish had a 99 cent print sale the other day. My wife asked me to go nuts and print a couple hundred 5-star pictures of the kids. I printed about 500 pictures. I figured while I was at it, I’d throw in a couple of my renders just to see what they looked like printed on photo-quality glossy paper. I can’t print them at home since I don’t have an inkjet printer. I use a color laser, and at 1200dpi, it’s just not the same.
Besides, inkjet prints never look as good as “the real thing”. I don’t care what anyone says, printing photos on an inkjet just isn’t the same as having them done by a photo joint. That, and the cost of photo paper and ink is just too cost prohibitive. (Not to mention the time it takes.) In my experience, the ink is usually dried up when you need it the most. So, when it comes to printing photos, I send them to snapfish.
They came out pretty damn good.
Some of the cropping was weird. I don’t know if that was me or not. There’s an option to check off at the end of the order to have true digital prints cropped to 4” x 5.25” instead of 4” x 6”. I’ve noticed that pictures from my iPhone that have an aspect ratio of 16:9 get scaled down to 4” x 5.25”. Everything else I took with my Nikon printed as a 4” x 6”. For some unknown reason, three of the renders I did with a 16:9 aspect ratio were scaled down to 4” x 5.25” (just like the iPhone pics) while most of the other renders printed as 4” x 6“.
Check out these three images. All were done with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The two Michael 6 renders printed as 4” x 6”. However, the Victoria 6 on the bottom, printed as a 4” x 5.25”. You can see in the bottom picture that the arrow head is cut off. I thought I had framed it properly before adding it to my cart. I can see missing one, but three images are like that. So that’s definitely something to look out for in the future. There must be a “gotcha” in there somewhere that I missed.
These have an aspect ratio of 8x10, so they printed fine at 4” x 6”.
I had a coupon for a free 8” x10”, so I only had to pay for one. I printed
Racer Girlz - Team 3 and
Surveillance. They look awesome. I can only imagine how amazing a 24” x 36” would look!
As great as the print is, it might be just a tad too dark. Still, the detail is nice and everything looks pretty great.
This was a pretty cool test. I might look into adding some kind of option to the site to have prints made up. I think that would be pretty cool.
