When I first got a digital SLR camera a few years ago, I spent some time evaluating photo printing options. I sent a set of test prints to several different companies, and wound up deciding to use
Shutterfly for my photo printing.
It's been some time since then, so I figured it was about time to re-evaluate options.
There are three main things to consider when obtaining prints of photos: cost of prints, quality of prints at delivery, and longevity of prints. Many people look only at cost, and those that look past cost rarely look past quality at longevity. Longevity (or permanence) is, in my opinion, the most important factor to consider. But let's look at all of them.
Longevity
All color photo print technologies fade or otherwise degrade over time. There are several main things that can cause this: exposure to light, exposure to gases (especially ozone), and exposure to humidity. The impact of these different items varies by print technology, paper, and process.
Longevity: Traditional Photo Paper
Most services such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Ofoto, as well as retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Walgreens print on traditional photo paper.
Historically, traditional photo paper has had terrible fading characteristics. Typically, old photos exposed to light -- for instance, hanging on a wall underneath a light bulb or in the sun -- will exhibit severe fade towards yellow or magenta. Modern papers are much better, but you will still not want to leave them directly in the sun or under lights.
Over at TPR, you can find
several papers analyzing this. Perhaps the most interesting are
test of digital prints and
image permanence: comparing the technologies.
To attempt to summarize, what you see is that of the two common consumer-grade photo papers, Kodak Royal and Fuji Crystal Archive, the Fuji paper has better permanence. However, the pro-quality Kodak Professional Supra Endura is better than either of them by a significant margin. The photo papers didn't really have a problem with humidity, and not much of a problem with ozone.
Longevity: Inkjet
So what about inkjets and laser processes? The main thing I learned from my research is that there is a tremendous amount of variance here. When looking solely at top-quality inkjet papers and inks, they ranged everywhere from having little bits of them flake off after a few months to doing better than any of the photo papers. This variance occurred even with similar papers from the same manufacturer.
As far as light exposure is concerned, every inkjet paper tested by TPR did better than Kodak Royal. Some fared about the same as Fuji Crystal Archive. And some even beat out Kodak Supra Endura.
But look at the ozone exposure test and you see a far different picture. All of the photo papers did really well, though suprisingly Supra Endura was the worst of them (though the scale is so small here that the difference is pretty minimal).
Not one of the inkjet papers came even close to that, and some faded so fast that they couldn't even make it halfway through the test.
As far as humidity is concerned, it barely impacted the photo paper prints at all. Inkjet impacts were still mostly small, but also were mostly more impacted than the photo paper.
Longevity: Laser
And finally, how about laser prints. There was huge variety here. An HP printer they tested faded so fast it couldn't complete the light exposure test, while a Konica-Minolta fared better than Kodak Supra Endura in one test. In another light exposure test, they performed about the same as the photo papers. Ozone had little effect on the laser papers, except for the Dell test, which faded so fast they had to abort the test early. Humidity also had little effect on the laser prints.
Longevity: Other Examples
Brett Wilson did some interesting
experiments with photos hung in front of a window as well. Wilhelm Imaging also has done some research in this area, though they are done using fluorescent lights only, which is prejudicial in favor of inkjet papers and against photo papers.
For the ultimate in longevity, true black and white photo paper is well-regarded.
TPR also has a report covering different lacquer and other finishes often applied to prints to improve their longevity.
Longevity: Conclusions
With the exact right combination of inkjet paper and ink, you can get a print that will last exceptionally long. Some inkjet paper and ink combinations have really poor longevity characteristics, however, as do the laser papers.
Photo papers, especially Kodak Supra Endura, but even Fuji Crystal Archive, will last quite awhile as well, and are probably the best storage if kept in dark conditions such as an album.
Print Quality
When looking at print quality, I'm concerned with correct color balance, saturation, cropping, consistency, sharpness, contract, and detail in both dark and light areas -- the typical things you'd look for.
Printing inkjet prints at home leaves all this up to your printer, inks, papers, and you, so we can't really compare meaningfully.
Back when I looked at it, Shutterfly and Ofoto did the best. Walmart, Walgreens, dotPhoto, and many of the other online sites were really too poor to even bother with. Ofoto had a bit of a yellow tint to it, while Shutterfly did pretty well.
Most of the reviews of the major sites I've seen lately rank Shutterfly or Snapfish at the top in terms of quality. Many also rank Ofoto/Kodak near the top.
Walmart and Walgreens produce consistently bad results, and I only use them if all that matters is speed. If you ever read a review where somebody says that they get good results from one of those places, find a review where somebody has a better idea what they're talking about.
Besides your mass-market sites like Shutterfly and Ofoto, there are also some slightly more expensive sites. The two best-known are mpix.com and adorama.com. Mpix is a division of Miller's Professional Imaging, a pro lab. Mpix is basically a website where you can submit photos in the way you would to one of these other sites, and they can do their thing. Their standard rate includes human color correction on every print, but they offer a cheaper rate if you don't need that. Their standard paper is Kodak Pro Supra Endura (the one that ranked highest in longevity tests), and the options go up from there. They also offer printing on true black and white paper, as well as wrap-around canvas and other such options.
I've sent some work their way and have been exceptionally happy with the result. Everything from the color of the prints down to the packaging shows extreme care and attention to detail. Among the reviews that cover mpix -- many don't -- it almost always comes out at the top of the pack, easily beating out Shutterfly and Snapfish. It can be more pricy (though sometimes actually cheaper, since shipping is flat-rate with them), though not significantly.
Adorama is also sometimes mentioned. Most people seem to prefer mpix over adorama, but some prefer adorama. It's a bit cheaper when you don't need color correction for some prints, but sometimes -- right now, for instance -- closes for weeks at a time to observe Jewish holidays. It didn't seem to be enough for me to bother.
Cost
Perhaps the easiest to figure out is cost, since websites typically list it right there for you.
High-quality inkjet prints are by far the most expensive option. I looked at 4x6 prints. Using the high-quality paper/ink combinations that did well in the TPR tests, and when buying supplies in bulk to get the best possible discount, it's still 25 cents or more for a single 4x6 print. That's with doing all the color work yourself, and not even figuring in the cost of the inevitable experimenting with getting the software set up right and the wasted prints when ink gets low. It also doesn't figure in the cost of the printer.
At mpix, if you do your own color correction, it's 19 cents per print, plus shipping. Prints are on Kodak Professional Supra Endura Shipping is a flat rate of $3 for 50 or fewer 4x6 or smaller prints, or a flat rate of $5.95 for USPS Priority Mail for anything else. They offer FedEx at an additional cost, which maxes out at a flat rate of $12.75 for overnight shipping. Some items such as framed canvas prints are more expensive.
Other options at an additional cost include color correction by a human, metallic paper, Ilford B&W paper, etc. There are also some more typical pro-lab options: red-eye removal by a human, custom retouching, etc.
At Shutterfly, a 4x6 print goes for 15 cents. You can get them as low as 10 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 600 prints for $60. Shipping varies based on the number of prints, starting at $1.79 for up to 10 prints, ranging up to $21 for 500 prints, with 3 cents per print after that. Priority and express mail is available at an additional charge. Shutterfly's standard paper is Fuji Crystal Archive.
At Snapfish, a 4x6 print goes for 9 cents. You can get them as low as 8 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 250 prints. Shipping at Snapfish follows a complicated formula, but is generally approximately the same as Shutterfly. Though if you print more than 595 prints, watch out for the 10 cents per print overage fee. They don't state what paper they use. Recent reports seem to suggest that it's Fuji Crystal Archive, but some reports claim it's Kodak Royal.
My Conclusions
I'm planning to switch most of my prints to mpix -- their higher quality and cheaper shipping offset their higher per-print cost for me. Also, I plan to try out Snapfish and see what sort of quality I get from them for things where quality isn't really that critical.
I attended Openmind last
week, an interesting conference organized by the Finnish Centre for Open
Source Solutions (COSS) to bring together open source professionals,
community members and academics in Finland. In the session about business
aspects of open source, in which I gave a talk about FOSS Governance, Nina
Helander and Mikko R nkk presented the preliminary results of the National Software Industry Survey
2008.
I found the results incredibly interesting. In particular, they found that
75% of responding firms use open source software in some way. This figure
is up from approximately 13% in the year 2000, which is a major increase in
just a few years. The study also found that that there was no
statistically significant difference of company size when it came to the
use of open source. Finally, companies that have open source components in
their offering rate themselves as more innovative.
Roberto Galoppini, who moderated the session, commented that Finland is
where Gartner predicted that companies would be in 3 years. Indeed, I
think everyone in the room was pleasantly surprised by the amazing numbers
from the survey. We should not forget that the study was with software
companies and that the use of open source will certainly be lower in other
industries, but nevertheless the study shows that Finland is a leading
country when it comes to the adoption of FOSS.
(Originally published on FOSSBazaar)
As well as my little 
One of html's deficiencies is that it doesn't have a tag to mark up a date.
If html had such a tag, then browsers could display dates using your time
zone, and in whatever format you like. Rather than in some random time
zone, that is often not even shown, and some random format.
My fav way to see a date is as relative date, such as "two days ago". With
a mouseover so I can see the exact, absolute date in the rare case I need
it.
It's possible to combine some javascript with html, so that, if
javascript is available, a nicely formatted relative date is displayed. And
with no javascript, an plain old absolute date is shown. Perhaps the
cleanest way to do it is using html like this, combined with javascript
that fires on page load, parses the date and replaces it with something nicer:
Sorry about the lack of updates, I have been really busy!
Anyway, dsyslog 0.5 will be out soon, with TLS support. Audacious2 development is moving along quickly again, we might actually get an alpha release out before the beginning of 2009.
Once I get dsyslog 0.5 out, I am going to start looking at NMUs in Debian to squash so we can get Lenny out… so the next few weeks should be pretty exciting.
I finally catched up with Gammu backlog from holidays and now it is time to
move it a bit further.
Automatic testing
During this week I set up 
Wow this Joe the Plumber phenomenon really seems to have Democrats spooked as they are now scrambling to find 
Screen Fork?
Just some small thoughts about cyclic lists in Haskell. Every Haskell beginner knows that you can use infinite lists, as long as you don t fully evalute them. So, this is perfectly valid
We re all aware of 
So Facebook pretty much missed the German market. There is StudiVZ which
has about 10 times as many users in Germany than Facebook has, and which
is sometimes called "red facebook" because of the similarities. Then there
is "green facebook", Lokalisten, which had started quite regional (and
invitation-only), but expanded since, and also is like 2-3 times the size
of german Facebook.So apaprently Facebook now decided they need to compete more in the German
market, and started a marketing campaign. As part of this campaign, Mark
Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, gave a talk in Berlin and Munich. The
marketing company uses a strategy where they try to push these two cities
to compete for having the largest fb userbase in Germany.The talk was okay, I would have wished for more entrepreneural chat; but
only a few of the questions were along these lines (e.g.: "when did you
know you had something big?"), instead some usual feature requests came
up ("Why can't I prevent others from tagging me on photos?")But the largest kudos I have to give to facebook is for actually finding so
many "ambassadors" that will do advertisement for them for free.
Well, they got a T-Shirt (that does a word play on "blue" and "taking a day
off", although it should probably say "I'm doing free promotion for fb and
all I got is this T-Shirt")It probably only works because Facebook on one hand has always been free,
is a "hip web2.0 thing", and they're trying to play "good guys" just like
Google does ("don't be evil"). Many people don't understand how despite
the privacy functions in Facebook people can still get their data with
just some old-style social engineering very easily (so no actual data
manipulation or abuse required, but when you do it the right way, just
about everybody on facebook will just give you his data voluntarily).Sometimes all this Web2.0 fanboying can be quite scary, but I figure that
is just the way people and societies work.
My wife has a laptop running Vista because she wanted to try out the operating system before having to decide on using it at work.