Sunday 6 November 2005

My Honey and Digital Prints (Flowery goodness)


So I just wanted to take a moment to talk about my honey. Really, honey. This isn't a euphemism for baby, or spouse or anything like that. We're talking honey. Or is it Selena's honey?

We were at the healthfood store the other day and Selena was looking at the honey. Pretty expensive stuff there. But apparently she wanted honey, and was trying to decided if it was that much more expensive than your average no-name container.

Leaving that question aside, we did leave the healthfood store with honey (and leaving aside the yummy apricot ginger bar we also left with and gnawed away at on the way home).

The honey is unpasturised. And, tastes amazing. So flowery and fruity tasting. That's all I have to say about that.

But now to digital printing. After reading some articles on the subject, it would seem there's some pretty convincing arguments against printing one's own photos on one's own printer (I say this as a person who just recently bought himself a nice new printer). The arguments against it are both economic and qualitative. It turns out for the smaller sized prints (4x6 and 5x8) is it just cheaper to have one of these online photo printing services, or kiosk-based print-yourself stands, do the work. On top of that the quality of the print is better, because they use much better equipment than a consumer level printer. The photos have better colour representation, and much better longevity.

However, all of the online services I knew of or had heard of at that time were American. Of course a Canadian can use those services, but then there's sometimes extra costs, and always the exchange rate to think of.

So I did some hunting to find some Canadian alternatives. I did find a few. These sites generally aren't as good or full featured as the big-time US based ones, but have around the same prices, and are... Canadian. We're talking around 35 cents per 4x6 print. Things get quite a bit more expensive for larger sizes (8x10, etc), and it may be more economical for the odd large print to do it on an inkjet (but the quality and longevity still will not be as good).

Anyhow, here's two I found...

Blacks: this one seems overall the better site. Less hoops to jump through.

Motophoto: this site uses a somewhat heavy Java application, and is kind of confusing. But looks like they might do a decent job.

I haven't tried either of these services, but may in the future.

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