I had just prepared an 8x10 for an agility friend. It was a photo I had taken in September of "Jake", a Belgian Tervuren. Only a month later, the dog died.
It was important to me that I made the best print I could. I have been having problems recently with my Epson 2000P so decided to try a few local photo printing places. Up until the end of last year I had been using an independent lab downtown with good results. They have since been taken over by a local chain and the last lot of prints I took there all had some sort of staining on the edge of the paper. I have tried Blacks but they alway make prints too contrasty and too saturated. Which brings me to Photolab in Loblaws' stores. My daughter works there part time so I gave her a CD to take in and print off for me to see what sort of a job they did. She called me from work to tell me they'd run out of paper to print 8x10s and hadn't had any in since last week! Then she asked if she should take the file over to Walmart in her break. I said OK, try it out, if it's not much good then I haven't wasted too much money. She rang back again in a strop "Walmart are being stupid" she said. (don't you just love teenagers :-) ). Apparently they wanted her to use the kiosk to print her own out. She was not impressed and informed me that they had one of those kiosks in the Loblaws store where she worked and the paper was "crap" and so were the prints.
I have to agree with her assessment of these kodak photokiosks. I did the same exercise just over a year ago with three other one-hour-photo places close to where I live or worked (the best had turned out to be a Photolab in Loblaws over the river in Quebec) and the photo kiosk was one of the things I tried out.
I don't consider myself picky but this printing is driving me insane!
Wendy Beard,
Ottawa, Canada
http://www.beard-redfern.com
