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“For a long time I have been waiting for a colour...”

written by MattBeard on 09/05/2005

Good Points
Good quality prints, Good price, Fast Service.

Bad Points
99p P&P with every order, Upload program would help.

General Comments
For a long time I have been waiting for a colour printer that can print 6x4 photos of good quality without having to spend an arm and a leg on consumables (or having to wait hours to print more than a couple of prints).



At last I have a solution - but it isn't a printer that sits on my desk, it's at TruPrint.



I simply e-mail as many digital photos as I want to trueprint and they are added to my online albums (I can upload them from a web page, but it is easier for me to e-mail them).



To make things easier I can put all my photos into a "zip" file before sending them which saves time selecting files (but is no quicker to upload).



The prints have so far arrived either the next day, or two days later (even though I live in the North of Scotland) and to the untrained eye look just like normal photos from any decent developing service.



If you know what to look for you can tell the pictures are from a digital camera (not the print quality, but the way digital cameras make sharp details look slightly different than film cameras).



Photo enthusiasts may well think the quality could be better (I can't say as I'm not an expert!) but as far as I can tell if you are happy with the quality from a high-street photo processor or the normal "send-away" services you will be pleased.



The price is very good - far cheaper than even the paper for any of the photo printers I have considered. I pre-pay and so get my prints at 8p each. There is probably scope for this to be reduced over time with a little competition, but it is still good. You have to add 99p per order for P&P which is not too bad if you are doing 200 prints, but a bit sad when you are just after a couple of re-prints!



The delivery is fast and the prints are well packaged. You can even specify different addresses so you can send prints to family and friends (but only one address per order, so if you want to send pictures to 3 friends that will be an extra £2.97 P&P)



The only real fly in the ointment is that with broadband as we have it in the UK you only get 256kbps upload speed, even on fast packages. This means that some of my larger orders have taken an hour to upload all the photos. It would be nice to have a TruPrint program that allowed you to select what pictures you want to send, then uploaded them. This would be a little easier, especially if it let you preview them before uploading, and would be able to resend if something happened such as a computer crash half-way through uploading. It would also be possible for this program to send slower than the maximum speed (so the broadband link can be used for other things while uploading). If the program could also be used for ordering the prints before they were uploaded it would be even easier!