A digital printing service. I finally got round to sorting out my digital photos last week. After promising myself I wouldn’t leave it so long this time, I ended up having nearly a whole years worth, and I probably take more photos than most. So this is my review of digitalfoto, who dealt with 470 of my pictures.
www.directfoto.co.uk us where I got my digital photos printed this week. I was very impressed with the quality of them – all on glossy kodak paper and the colours and contrast all appeared how I expected them to.
Pleased that all prints had our order number and postcode on the back, so could be traced if they did get lost in the post.
The prices vary according to how many prints you order. I am very unorganised and ended up doing 470 photos going from Christmas last year and included the tonnes I took on holiday in August. After 50 photos it’s the cheapest rate at 10p per print for 6″x4″ standard size, or 5.3″x4″ digital size. 15p per print for 7×5 standard, or 6.6×5 digital. So I had 186 at the smaller size and 277 at the bigger size and it came to £60 all together. The postage was a standard £1. I looked around the internet and this does seem like one of the best deals you can get.
I was also surprised at how many sites on the internet offered really good prices – usually 10p per print but only offered the original film sizes, not the digital. They also didn’t seem to inform the customer that their photos would be stretched to fit and would therefor be distorted by an inch. I feel sorry for those who don’t know about that.
Where you have cropped your photos in whater editing software you have, directphoto give you the option of white spaces or stretched to fit. I personally get out the ruler and stanley knife and cut off all the white bits.
You can send in your cd (and they’ll replace it with a blank one for next time) or memory stick (which is guaranteed safe or they’ll replace it) or submit your photos over the internet. I did the latter as I wanted to change the size often, and it was easy and didn’t take long; however once completed, it took nearly a whole day to upload to their site, so only do on a cheap weekend rate, or with broadband!
A couple of things to mention. Though I was pleased with the photos, a few of them haven’t been cut very well and there’s a narrow white strip at the edge, which was a pain to cut off. Also, for some reason you send your things off to Hampshire, but your photos come back from Gurnsey. They dealt with my order and dispatched it within 2 working days, and they were posted 1st class, but I didn’t receive them till 6 days later. It takes the same time with any other postal order I’ve done, but I was worried this time because they’d been dispatched earlier and I didn’t realise they were coming from there. You also have to persevere to speak to them on the phone (lots of strange tones before I got to someone) and my first e-mail enquiry wasn’t replied to; though after that they were.
