Introduction |
Skip the queues |
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Kiosks aren't kiosks |
The results |
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Worth the full thousand words? |
Proof in the pictures |
Worth the full thousand words?
Ultimately, however, the decision about which kiosk to use comes down to the quality of the prints that come out the other side. To be as objective as possible, we labelled each set of pictures with a number corresponding to a particular print house, then mixed all prints in each set and put them in order from best quality to worst.
In some cases, the differences between prints were obvious. Shots with large expanses of blue sky, which is filled with subtle tonal differences, showed marked differences between kiosks. The sunset picture showed the biggest variation between prints, while the well-balanced outdoors happy snap, which lacked extremes of tonality or colour shades, was the most consistently good print between kiosks.
Lacking an objective measurement to judge photographic quality, we ranked the pictures based on their overall aesthetic appearance. This included attention to each picture's sharpness, colour richness, detail in darker parts of the picture, rendering of colour tones, warmth of flesh tones and the saturation of bold colours such as the green grass.
The results were surprising. Camera House, the most expensive retail chain, came up tops overall, with an average ranking of 2.81, and Jade Studio wasn't far behind at 3.00. Big W outranked fellow cut-price printer Harvey Norman, as well as Kmart and Ted's -- confirming that you can get good pictures without paying a bundle. Kmart's thermal printing, which uses the kiosk's built-in printer to spit out your prints while you stand there, came up the worst, with an average ranking of 5.54 (buyers beware: many stores without photo labs, such as Officeworks, only offer thermal printing).
We took these results back to Jade Studio, where proprietor Doug Foley has spent the better part of 20 years printing pictures both digital and film-based. Although Foley still prefers film-based photography for pure quality of image, he recognises the shift towards digital has become inexorable -- even though it means a reduction in print quality that seems acceptable to most consumers.
For many such consumers, cost is king: with sale prices dipping below AU$0.20 per print, he says, many big operators are using loss leading to sell prints at below cost. The strength of the convenience sell, Foley believes, can make it hard to convince consumers to pay that little bit more for good-quality printing at their local store. In many cases, he adds, the overall quality of the print ultimately comes down to the printing unit operator -- and whether pictures are just batch printed with automatic exposure settings or get individual attention, as is more likely in a smaller shop.
"Digital printing just doesn't offer the tolerance that photographic film has," Foley explains. "If the printing of a digital image is just a half-stop in the wrong direction, the image can be right out. It's far easier to get good tones from a film negative than a digital image."
Print quality also depends on a host of other factors, ranging from the temperature and mix of printing chemicals to dust on the printing lens, paper used, and operator training and judgment. These all vary from store to store, but our tests confirmed that cheaper stores aren't necessarily skimping on these essential ingredients.
One issue we couldn't test is the longevity of the prints; some papers hold the ink better than others, and all prints will last longer if they're kept out of direct sunlight. We didn't test image permanence in this exercise, but stay tuned. What we did learn was that paying more money for digital prints won't necessarily give you better quality; consider all alternatives until you find the one that consistently produces pictures that suit your tastes, and then stick to it.
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barrie harrop
11/11/2006 08:42 PM
Try Kodak kiosk killer coming to Aust www.pxidigital.com
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Sue Taffel
25/02/2007 06:24 PM
Bravo! This is obviously a larger version of something I discovered last year. Such a shame about the Agfa machine. It was by far the best value for money and quality. Here's a curly question: all machines add brown, presumably for 'richness'. How can I compensate for this so that grey stays grey?
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tommie
14/10/2007 09:43 AM
Photo kiosks over 75,000 hits on our web site fro www.pxidigital.com sue we can fix your problem at pxi.
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Hammer11
29/10/2007 09:26 AM
You comment about inks at the end of the piece which is funny because photolabs do not print your regular 4x6 on anything except true light sensitive photographic paper. The only difference is the exposure is done by laser rather than a lamp like anologue machines used to
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stuart
16/03/2008 12:07 PM
there was no comments on what format the photos are required to be in? ie do they need to be in jpg, tiff, bmp etc?
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