Disclaimer: anything I put into this entry is purely based on my own experience.  All content is my personal opinion.

Continuing on from yesterday’s topic, a review of CostCo’s print service. To keep things fair, I’ll use the same criteria: color skewing, sharpness, paper quality, and cropping. And before I go in to trashing the CostCo online printing, let me state: most people that I know like their service & see nothing wrong with it.  My problems could conceivably be due to my own behavior (which works fine with other print shops), or it could be the location nearest me.

Color: good God, possibly the worst coloring I’ve ever seen.  Take a nice, warm scene with green grass and a smiling, pink baby.  Got it in mind?  Now turn the grass dull (light) grayish green, the skin tones more yellowish, and remove any character from dirt in the pic.  That’s what happened to me.  I’d say that it’s like submitting an AdobeRGB photo when they’re expecting sRGB – only I’ve done that, and it’s no worse.  And other printers don’t skew it so badly.

The color problem appears to be specific to large prints, BTW.  But in this day & age, that’s all I do, so it hurts.

Crops: Again, one heck of a crop that I’ve seen.  One year I used their 5×7″ photos for our holiday cards.  There was “Happy Holidays” in script towards the bottom, and made sure there was plenty of padding between the edges and the letters.

They still chopped into it.

Paper quality: decent.  Kodak, pretty good weight.  Felt like a waste of quality paper after seeing the color shift.

Sharpness: to their credit, they didn’t add any sharpening.  The end results were more or less what I expected.

Overall: I won’t touch their photo service with a ten-foot pole. YMMV.