One-Stop Digital Photography Guide

Print Your Digital Photos

Photographers now have more options for printing digital images than ever before. You can take your images to a photo kiosk at a nearby store, order prints from an online photo-finishing site, or use an ink jet printer. We compared these three methods for photo quality, cost, and processing time. Here's what we found.

The Setup

The most recent addition to photo printing is a photo kiosk, a self-service station where you can get prints of your digital photos. You can find kiosks just about everywhere--camera shops, supermarkets, drugstores, and warehouse clubs.

We tried five different kiosks: Agfa's E-box (available in some camera shops), Fujifilm's Aladdin (available in Ritz Camera and Wolf Camera), Kodak's Picture Maker (widely available in shops such as Rite-Aid, Safeway, and Walgreens), Pixel Magic IStation 200 (available in some camera stores), and Sony PictureStation (available in Sony stores, some camera shops, and in Kinko's soon). Overall, we like the Agfa, Kodak, and Sony services best for their beautiful photos, ease of use, and affordable prints.

All kiosks work in much the same way: On a touch screen, you indicate your media (most accept CompactFlash, CD, floppy disk, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, and SmartMedia), upload your pics, select the sizes, and print.

We also used five online photofinishers to print our shots: Club Photo, Ofoto, PhotoWorks, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Among them, we like Ofoto and Club Photo best for their handsome and reasonably priced prints. As with kiosks, you upload photos, edit them if necessary, choose which pictures you want, and place your order.

The time it takes to upload pictures can be an issue, especially if you upload many shots or if you use a dial-up connection. We used a DSL connection and waited between 5 and 10 minutes to transfer five pics (totaling 5.8MB) at each site; Shutterfly was a tad slower than the other sites.

Finally, we evaluated a third printing option: an ink jet photo printer. We used the $349 Epson Stylus Photo 960 because it's one of the top-ranking models on our Top 5 Photo Printers chart.

Print Quality

Little else matters if your printed photos don't look good. Overall, we were impressed by how nice our pics turned out from all three print methods. For color and detail, we like the prints from Ofoto and Agfa's E-box best. Ofoto's prints had very nice color and contrast. Agfa's E-box produced great color and detail, though our 8-by-10-inch portrait looked just slightly undercontrasted.

Most of the prints were similar in quality and, overall, impressive, though we rated those from Pixel Magic's IStation 200 a notch below the others. Its print of our photo taken on a cloudy day looked greenish, a close-up of a butterfly was overcontrasted, and a flower looked pink instead of red. Fine details were also lost in our close-up shot. Still, you should be pleased by how good your prints look, no matter which of these services you use.

The kiosks and the photofinishing sites all print on photographic paper and use either a silver halide printing process (which is used in film-based prints) or a dye sublimation printer. Both processes tend to produce better color gradients than ink jets do. So even though Epson's Stylus Photo 960 scored highly on our Top 5 Photo Printers chart, its prints weren't quite as appealing as those from the kiosks and online services.